


consent to be wrecked

by cicak



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Dark Leia Organa, Diplomacy, Drugged Sex, Dubious Consent, F/M, Humiliation, Leia Organa is going to win this war, M/M, Not a Happy Story, Poe Dameron hurts so pretty, Poe Dameron's weaponised loyalty, Post-Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Pre-Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Rape/Non-con Elements, War, and does such good work on his knees, but not what you need, ceasefire, ignores before the awakening, sometimes you get what you want
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-11
Updated: 2016-06-22
Packaged: 2018-07-14 11:08:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 32,803
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7168589
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cicak/pseuds/cicak
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The old proverb is right, there is no weapon more deadly, more devastating, than a young man who will die for you.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Melting down the family silver

**Author's Note:**

> All soaked in sex, and pressed against  
> The limits of the sea:  
> I saw there were no oceans left  
> For scavengers like me.  
> We made it to the forward deck  
> I blessed our remnant fleet -  
> And then consented to be wrecked  
> A thousand kisses deep.

Young men are, in many ways, the perfect weapon, as if designed so by a creator uncaring about their longevity. Their metabolisms are fast so they can build healthy muscle even on lean rations, their reflexes are as sharp as assassins’ blackened knifes, and they have this mental strength that is clear, uncomplicated and unstoppable, that is, until you want them to break, and then they break so easily, so prettily, it’s akin to art. You can take a young man, fill him with idealism or bile, it doesn’t really matter which, and then send him off to war, to be wasted, because what are young men in war but the ultimate disposable resource? If you don’t use them, they become old men, their vigour transmutes into cunning, into lust for something other than cheap thrills. 

The old proverb is right, there is no weapon more deadly, more devastating, than a young man who will die for you, but time turns all men into a different kind of dangerous. 

So when he, he who would command armies, who would be a prince on a lesser world, someone so brimming with potential and sincere idealism came to her, into her private chambers, and said please, please use me as you wish, she was powerless to resist.

* * *

When she asks for his credentials, he just says that he can fly, but the combination of a shy smile and ducked head combined with a tone of such convincing self-deprecation means she almost doesn’t believe him, but when they put him in a simulator he proves that he can outfly even her husband, something Han grumbles about, despite him being twice this boy’s age and knowing that his reflexes are nothing like they were. 

He is jubilant when he’s told his results, and this boy should infuriate her, just another cocky pilot wannabe who thinks that wars are fought in dogfights and in close combat, who thinks that her husband is the defining hero of the old war he heard only echoes of as a boy. He’s someone with no appreciation for the political sphere, for the cutthroat world of diplomacy, of the wars that she prevented that will never be more than a footnote, undoing the damage the jumped up cocky pilots did, the people they killed, what would have been if she hadn’t got her hands dirty.

Nevertheless, Leia has this sense about people where she knows immediately where they will fit in the grand plans that weave through her mind, complicated and beautiful like the swirl of galaxies. She knows that the Dameron boy is whip-smart and intellectually flexible, honest and deeply honourable and, most remarkably, nearly incorruptible, so astonishingly so it takes her breath away. She knows all this before she even knows his first name. There is a light in him that Luke alluded to, he is special, but it doesn’t feel like the conflict that she senses within her brother, the tidal pull of raw power and benign goodness that he clings to, lest he fall into the warm grasp of the dark side, with its easy power and simple solutions. Instead, what she senses within Poe is pure light, uncomplicated and too bright to look at, it spills from his every pore, and she gets the feeling that if she broke him open, crushed him into dust, she wouldn’t find an atom of the dark side. He leaves an imprint on her like she’s been staring at the sun.

The practicalities of war prevail; Poe Dameron is no concubine and he’s too memorable to be a spy. He has no formal training in the seductive or pleasure arts, to the point where he was practically virginal when he delivered himself to her. He sticks out like a sore thumb, memorable and cocky, walking everywhere with a strut that no one could forget. On another world, one where she had more resources and the luxury of time, maybe she would have called in a favour and sent him to one of the pleasure planets for training anyway, but they are short on pilots and the head of their tiny, chronically understaffed fleet is already breathing down her neck, desperate to get her hands on him.

All armies have secret weapons, and for a while, it seemed like he could be theirs. If she doesn’t move quickly he’ll end up smeared across the hull of a star destroyer, a legend for all the wrong reasons. She may not be able to see the future with the wry smiling way her brother can, but she can feel it, has a special sense for the way that stories weave themselves around people, and Poe is at the centre of something great.

She loses him the first time to the pressures of the other generals and the admiral of their tiny fleet, but not without a fight. Recruits are sparse, and they all want him to be that shining star they need after so many losses, and so when she concedes and they give him an x-wing older than he is and stoke his hero worship and idealistic deathwish, they nevertheless allow her a week, just a week, in the middle of training, to use him as she sees fit. 

* * *

Poe Dameron is surprised when he is pulled out of basic training for a secret project, and then disappointed that it was for, of all things, a photoshoot. He arrives into one of the conference rooms to find the table dismantled and the room hot with lights and busy people. As soon as he arrives there’s a droid with swatches of fabric in his face, and another spinning around on a million tiny wheels taking his measurements. It snaps a laser at him and chirps every time it makes a record of each tiny increment of his physique. 

“Surely I don’t need a new flight suit for a holo?” Poe asks to the General, who is sitting in an armchair, talking to C-3PO about shot composition and other important things Poe really has no idea about. He can just about keep his thumb away from the lens, but that is all the camera skills he has.

He’s met her before, he pledged himself personally to her after all, turning up in the dead of night with a stolen starfighter and nothing else but idealism and a grin he’s been told is dangerous. She had been a figure in his early childhood, and she came to his mother’s funeral, but Leia Organa wasn’t so much a family friend as a family legend, and so he had worshipped her the way other kids worshipped their pop cultural icons, put her picture on the shrine on Yavin when she was running for reelection, back when he still believed that the shrines had power.

The reality of working for her, fighting in her war, still brings him that thrill, like there’s still a bit of faith there, somewhere in his brain.

“The clothes maketh the man” she says, enigmatically, and turns away back to Threepio, who fusses loudly and then says something in binary to the other droids, and he’s lost again in a whirl of dressmakers’ pins and measuring lasers.

Posing is awkward. The lights blind him to everything in the room, so he can’t read the body language of the thankfully human holographer. There is nothing to work off, the flight suit is too tight, and he’s aware that he is fucking this up, too tense, too awkward. He wants a drink or some pain, something to take his mind off how goddamn uncomfortable he is.

The holographer is muttering, and then Leia is stepping out from behind the left hand box light, lit behind like one of the old pictures of angelic beings appearing from behind a paintbox nebula.

“You need to relax, Poe. Forget that the lights are here. We want to see you, and how lovely you are.”

“I can’t, ma’am”, he says, hearing the childish whine in his voice. “It’s uncomfortable. It doesn’t feel real. There’s no way any pilot would wear this, I can’t move.”

Leia takes his hand and strokes it, which makes him feel calmer, although a slight tinge of embarrassment at her maternal touch when he looks like this. “None of this is real, Poe. We don’t want to recruit people to our cause using Poe Dameron, pretty good pilot in a grease-stained, heavily-darned jumpsuit he looks like he slept in because he is so dedicated to the cause. We want people to see Lieutenant Dameron, hotshot pilot, in fact, the best pilot in the goddamn galaxy, fighting for _us,_ a goddamn hero, a man with the face of an angel who should have a conquest in every port but in fact has a sweetheart back home he just goddamn wants to get back to, what a guy, and he can’t unless you, yes, you, stand up and be counted in the fight against the tide of evil.” She drops her voice low at this point, so no one else can hear her. “And that Lieutenant Dameron has a flight suit that goddamn fits, and doesn’t have suspicious stains on it.”

Her sudden change of tone is more shocking than a slap but the General is smiling as if it’s fine, barely a chastisement, like this is something your commanding officer just _says_. 

“This is propaganda. You’ve heard the term ‘hearts and minds’? This is that. You’ll lend us your face for a bit, won’t you? I promise we won’t do anything bad with it.” She’s flirting a little, really buttering him up, and he is powerless to say no.

She steps back, just to the side of the lighting rig. “Keep your eyes on me, and do what I tell you, and you’ll do fine,” she says, and he does, and is.

His old buddies in the Republic send him blurry pictures of his face taken out of the window of their X-Wings while on patrol. The enormous, pixelated version of his face winks at him and proclaims that they should ‘fight the good fight’. The suit is definitely not regulation, but he can’t deny it looks good, and when that squadron turns up on their doorstep with twelve brand new X-Wings and their pilots, he feels pretty goddamn great, like maybe there’s something he can do other than fly ‘wings after all.

* * *

The arrival of an entire squadron of elite pilots eases up the horrendous pressure the fleet had been operating under. Leia’s plan was a success, and she wants just one thing in payment for her prodigious coup, and they give it to her gladly, like children discarding their favourite toy for something newer and shinier, and so from then on, instead of being the Resistance’s secret weapon, he becomes hers.

She’s almost spoiled for choice when she sits down to finally work out exactly what she wants to do with him. It would be easy to do what she’s done with countless beautiful, promising young men before, and train him to be eternally loyal, but Poe Dameron already has that and more. 

He wants to be helpful, more than anything, and there are a million ways for a young, beautiful, charming man to be helpful in times of war. If Han were here, he could tell stories, but Han’s off having a three-quarter life crisis, and he always had a terrible eye for strategy.

Luke wouldn’t like it, would never approve of what she wants to build inside the son of one of his dearest friends, but he never understood what it’s like to win a war without magic at your disposal. When he disappeared following the massacre, the absolute destruction of her family, her marriage, her goddamn world, so did any semblance of her desire to preserve the old ways, to tiptoe around the fact that her own brother doesn’t realise that the war they’ve fought their whole lives has only just begun. That the massacre changed everything, but not in the ways they needed.

This is wartime, and sometimes when things get really desperate you have to melt down the family silver to make bullets.

* * *

When Poe was told he would be working more closely with General Organa on important projects he was disappointed, but also excited. His father had warned him, when he commed through back channels that he had defected, that meeting his heroes would ultimately never stack up, but every day he spends with her he finds that she does. She is brilliant, as fierce as her reputation, but also funny, sarcastic and smart. He is besotted with the idealism of serving her, of being able to help. 

She seems to like him, even though she calls him a sweet moon child more than he would like. He never resented being brought up a colonist, but she is so cultured, so well-read, and he’s just some kid from some back moon who learned to read on mechanical handbooks and never got a taste for much else. 

It’s gentle stuff to start with: he spends half a year escorting her to meetings on the cultural centres of the galaxy, and in that time he gets more of an education than he’d ever got at school. He prefers a good holo at the end of the day, but he learns to appreciate the soft romance in the great plays, the way they replicate the heart of the great battles in the brush of a hand or a lingering look. He learns from long hours in the galleries, as the General goes about her general business in the presence of the old masters, to analyse the hidden choices in the way the great artists pictured the light, their choice of brushstrokes, the way the epic gardens tell the classic stories he grew up on, and how to spot the reformative hand of Leia Organa in all of these things, to understand the power she has long wielded, and how she has formed their culture to her tastes. 

She saves these assignments for him, taking Jom Abbagon on the dangerous ones, the ones where she needs an actual bodyguard, someone to watch her back who is proven in hand-to-hand. 

Poe still flies formation and drills, still completes the assignments that show up on his holopad, and continues to find his place as a functioning member of the resistance both professionally and socially, but everyone knows he is Leia Organa’s man, as if her thumbprint was pressed right into the middle of his forehead for all to see, and when he misses a shift due to having to partake of a once-in-a-lifetime Corellian sunset, then that seems to be okay.

The other pilots are childishly jealous of his new assignment and rib him mercilessly for it. 

Dawken frames his hands like a holoprojector, capturing Poe’s profile as he watches training footage. They are both supposed to be analysing their most recent mission footage, but Dawken is ever the jokester and hasn’t done much more than what the computer told him to do. “You may not look much like Han, Poe,” he muses, “but there’s something there. I can see what she sees in you.”

Poe swats him absently, catching the plush curve of Dawken’s lush pout with his finger tips. “Come on man, it’s not like that. Anyway, you see yourself in me just fine, five nights a week,” he jokes, his eyes still glued to the screen where his x-wing is dancing gracefully across the simulated starscape. His fingers are twitching against phantom controls. He takes a moment to glance over and smile, because he knows that he’s being boring. They’re nestled in the high walls of a bank of terminals, analysts around them, this time stolen from them at Leia’s behest. 

“I swear to god, Dameron,” Dawken says, and snakes a hand under the desk to where Poe is hard in his rolled-down flightsuit, the arms draped just so to hide that fact from prying eyes. “You’re hard as a fucking rock, is x-wing footage really so good for you?”

Poe swats him again, eyes harder this time. “Seriously, later, Leia got me this time and I’m not going to fuck it up.”

Dawken’s eyebrows shoot up so high they almost hit his high hairline. “It’s _Leia_ now, is it? Not General Organa like the rest of us?”

“She insisted,” Poe mutters, his eyes back on his terminal. “Look, if you’re bored, go, I’ll find you later, okay? We can,” he waves his hand, “play x-wing analyst. Something something joystick. I need to do this. I thought you _wanted_ to go over footage? You’re always complaining we don’t get any time to reflect.”

Dawken narrows his eyes as he leaves. “Fine, man, you are just no fun anymore. Enjoy your blue balls.”

When Poe rolls into the barracks gone 2AM, phantom x-wings dancing behind his eyes and that afternoon’s erection long forgotten, Dawken has someone else in his bunk, and Poe is so tired that even their less-than-gentle rutting can’t keep him awake, and he drifts off easily, letting the rattle and sway of the bunk lull him to sleep.

It is easy, for a while, to enjoy being the favourite one. He manages a year of being so-called good for her, even though she never explicitly gave him orders or defined what ‘good’ was, so it is an effort in second guessing, reading the micro expressions on her face, the way her voice changes when she’s disappointed and when she’s pleased with him. It is hard though, studying, learning, refining himself, without the structure of school or the academy, trying to be better for better’s sake, with no end date in sight. Still, he tests into advanced strategy, and then just as quickly out of it, and into the rank of Captain. 

The other Generals, more and more of whom turn up each month as they defect themselves, seem to distrust him, apart from a couple, who like to look at him, ask him questions, trace a long finger down the hair on his arm. It is intoxicating, feeling special.

It’s frankly incredible that he manages to not fuck it up for that first year.

* * *

The resistance is different from the Republican military in many ways, but put a group of young adrenaline junkies with low life expectancies together and rooms will get trashed. It is a problem that they are secretly glad to have, because at least it means that they’re still here.

The ready room is a squalid mess most of the time, full of discarded junk food wrappers and empty alcohol bottles. The refresher in particular is disgusting. The reason she’s here is hanging off the wall - the comm has been brutally wrenched from its sockets, its cabling exposed and extruded in a way that would cause any nearby droid to recoil in disgust. 

On the filthy carpet is the person she is looking for, face down with his shapely behind up. It is obscene to see someone be fucked so openly, real sex being nothing like a porn holo, much more brutal and tightly controlled than the open sprawl of porn stars for the gaze of the lens. Poe’s body is sweat-slicked and glistening but there are sticky handprints on his body now full of lint and dust from rolling around on the floor. His hair is not styled, instead flattened from where it has been rubbing against something, perhaps the chest hair of the man, one of her commanders, who is railing him like his life depends on it, his hips almost a blur with the speed and strength he is putting into his jackhammering. Poe’s back is to her, and she is gripped with the thought that maybe, if she’d had reason to come here and pick him up before her meeting ran interminably long, she could have seen his face when she walked in on him getting fucked.

Leia is a woman of the world, and for all of their improbable chemistry and backbreaking tragedy, she’s been Han’s wife for thirty years, with everything that entails, and she feels sorry for Poe who is definitely enjoying himself, but there is also this fiercely familiar spark of jealousy that someone should be touching him without her permission, something she hasn’t felt since she saw Lando wearing Han’s clothes on Cloud City.

“Commander!” she barks, putting all her reservoirs of shock and disgust into the tone of her voice.

Commander Webo jerks with surprised so hard he wrenches his cock out of Poe, which causes him to gasp and roll over, eyes wide when he sees her.

Webo is apologising profusely, attempting to salute and put on his trousers at the same time. His penis has deflated and seems to be trying to retract into his body with shame. She glares at him, but nods to allow him to drop his hand so he can get himself back together.

When Webo has left, ducking and bowing as he runs past her, red as the sun, she turns back to Poe, who is still lying naked on the disgusting floor, but on his back now, idly tracing the prominent lines of his abdominals as he watches her. He is still hard, his dick lying purple and angry against his pelvis, and his face is all challenge and curiosity but it’s layered over the overwhelming stench of fear, fear that she’ll banish him, that she’ll demote him, that she’ll _hate_ him. She can sense just how much power she has over him right then, how much he wants to please her. 

It is fascinating.

Instead of saying the kind of thing she wants to say and spoiling it, she holds his gaze defiantly, as if nothing is happening. “Captain, I wanted to speak to you before afternoon sitrep. You will be flying a scouting mission this afternoon for me, one of immense delicacy. I recommend you put your clothes on and report to the hanger as soon as possible.”

She heads back to her ready room and immediately relieves Webo of his commission with extreme prejudice, sending him back to the Republic homeworlds on the next available transport with his tail between his legs and hopefully a lifetime of sexual dysfunction at the hands of his obvious shame at being caught with his pants down, and sends a message to Han on one of their old frequencies. They are still married, they always will be married, there’s no way that she could be anyone else’s wife, especially at this time in her life. She could get herself off, but she wants him, wants their old rhythm, the way Han doesn’t need to be telepathic to know exactly what she needs.

She has received many reports of how Poe Dameron conducts himself on base, and there’s been an idea forming in her mind that might grow into a plan if she puts some time into it. 

* * *

Leia pulls him out of a long afternoon of strategic training which in itself isn’t unusual - most of her missions stretch late into the night and she likes to indulge him. This time though, she tells him not to bother packing a bag - she’s already taken care of it. Sure enough, when he goes to pack their luggage into the cargo hold of their least dilapidated shuttle, there are two overnight bags, Leia’s well worn but ultimately fashionable tan holdall, and a brand new dark garment bag that looks butter soft and far too nice for the likes of him. 

He takes the pilot’s seat and begins preflight checks, wipes the dust from the passenger’s chair, but when Leia comes in she doesn’t take her usual place at the small desk, but comes up and sits in the co-pilot’s chair. 

“You don’t mind, do you?” she asks, after she sits down. “I just think it’d be nice for a change. Reminds me of the old days when Han would try and impress me with how he handled his first wife, that rustbucket.” He can’t help but chuckle. It’s an old joke, the Millennium Falcon long believed lost, but it is mechanic lore that Han loved that ship more than anything else. 

“What was it like?” he asks. “What, Han’s seduction technique?” She asks, tongue firmly in cheek.

“No”, he says, “The Falcon. It’s a legend. I would love to fly it.”

“You’d love to fly everything” she says, dismissively. “I don’t know. Han loved it, even though he couldn’t fly it on his own. Chewie was probably the best thing that ever happened to that boy, and I don’t say that to be self-deprecating. I shudder to think what Han was like before he met both of them.”

The conversation drifts off into companionable silence as he makes the jump to lightspeed. The shuttle is smooth as silk and well maintained, and for how much they struggle in the Resistance, he’s never in all honesty flown the way they used to have to fly, the old rebel force, in borrowed and stolen freighters, ancient ships held together with prayer and not much else.

He puts the ship into autopilot once the indicators say he can, and stretches out his muscles. 

He can feel Leia watching him as he does, which is a feeling he tries not to think too much about. 

“Poe,” she says, “I think you know that this isn’t a normal mission, yes?”

He nods, slowly. 

“There’s nothing much to say” she says. “You know that Jom dying means I am in need of a new personal bodyguard.” She sighs, playing with the rings on her left hand as she talks. “You realise that I don’t necessarily want one. A dedicated bodyguard, I mean. The rules demand I have one, but it feels so inefficient, when we have such problems with staff. None of the other members of the high command have someone, but they argue that I’m famous, that I stand for something more than just the military tradition, god forbid they actually _say_ the P word, but they’re all thinking it.”

Poe nods. His parents used to refer to Leia as ‘The Princess’ when at home. It wasn’t meant to be belittling, they had nothing but the utmost respect and admiration for her, plus, she was Princess Leia in all the propaganda, and in all the stories they told him she was at the heart, a warrior but also a princess. A living fairy tale, but one long ended, and she had been a military leader for far longer than she was a member of the Alderaanian court. Still, it is difficult to escape the pull of that particular story. 

“The truth is” she says “the Resistance has complex political and financial needs. It sits in a legal limbo, not officially approved of by the republic but not condemned either. We live in the shadows, and everything we do is semi-legal maneuvers on silent corners of underpopulated planets for a reason, but sometimes there’s a conference, a dinner, something where they need someone to put a good face on the old fashioned rebellion. Ultimately, that person ends up being me, for better or worse; to the ruling parties I am Princess Leia Organa of the tragic planet of Alderaan, and I will be that forever. I won’t be around forever though, and if you are willing, I’d like for you to do this job not just to keep me safe, but to formally learn diplomacy so one day you can take my place in helping the Resistance stay in business.”

Later, Poe will look back on this conversation and play it over in his mind a thousand times, imagine what would have happened if he’d said no. It never ends well, but it also never ends up the same.

Instead, he agrees, wholeheartedly, and at her word, goes into the back to change.

The garment bag is smart, and within it is essentially a new wardrobe. A casual uniform, much like what is worn on base when they’re forced out of their flight suits and casual clothes to play at being a real military, but far nicer than any of the ones he’s worn before. Everything about this endeavor, becoming Leia Organa’s favourite, feels like high quality fabric beneath his fingers. Most formal uniforms on base are hand-me-downs through nearly a generation of people who are too busy to procure such a thing, and it is rare to have something made from fabric that hadn’t been unpicked or let out after someone either grew or died out of need for it.

There is another uniform in there, unlike anything he’s ever worn in this or any other life. It is definitely military, curiously old fashioned in its lines, but modern all the same. It is a dark, hunter green, with a few touches of gold and navy where necessary. Even the insignia are fresh and stark white, not yet yellowed by the harsh chemicals of the base laundry. The stripes are embroidered into the fabric, not just tacked on. 

When he puts it on, it is tighter than he’s used to. It feels like a hug, at first. Perhaps this is what a proper fit feels like. The buttons don’t pull, there’s no gapping, and his shoulders are perfectly cupped by the structure in the jacket, but it feels like a perilous thing, like one good meal and he’ll ruin the seams.

When he retakes his seat, Leia gives him a firm look. “You scrub up well, Captain”, is what she says, but her eyes say something else, something deeper, and he can’t help it, he glows with pride.

* * *

He comes to this dinner with a new perspective, desperate to make the most of it. He’s there for security, officially, and Leia tells her companion of how awful it was for them, another devastating bombing run having taken many of their spare hands and the General’s normal hulking brute of a bodyguard, and her companion commiserates with her, insincerely. 

Poe comes to learn the different entities that live within Leia Organa, from the imperious General to the regal tragic princess to the savvy politician. She is in Leia mode, which is the most beguiling and charming of them all, a mixture of all her hands, and it shows in her regal posture, her uncanny knowledge, all those hours being gracious and political and knowing in her bones that she is better than them, in control. 

Her companion is clearly awed by her, and makes the kind of promises rich people who have no control over their actual money make. He promises to speak to his financial manager first thing, before they are due to leave. 

They have rooms, and when Poe walks her back up to them, she surprises him by pressing a credit chip into his hands, and tells him to go have fun.

“Keep your uniform on,” she says. “You’re my representative out here. There’s a time and a place for plain clothes. Show me I can trust your instincts, that you can work within this system.” She holds eye contact for a long moment, and it is like she is trying to tell him something but he hasn’t necessarily understood, before nodding and letting herself into her rooms. The door clicks shut, but he notes she does not lock it. He wonders if it means anything.

After the long day he is tired and the shine has worn off his new uniform. It is tight and it makes him uncomfortably aware of every inch of his body with every step. He can’t slouch in it, in fact, the fibres in it actively resist his attempts to relax, and the rest of the circumstances are making him be wound far tighter than he would normally be, but he has orders and a pathological need to make Leia proud of him, so instead of slinking into his room and pretending, he heads for the stairs.

He doesn’t end up going far, only makes it to the hotel bar in fact, but it’s a bustling place, full of the midweek evening crowd, not that Poe has ever had the kind of job that allowed him to be as free with his evenings as the people here are. He drinks the bartender’s recommendation, something hot and harsh that makes him want to take all his clothes off even more than before. It turns out that the view from the bar is lousy for people watching, most of the people he can see are slumped down under the heavy effects of this planet’s chosen drink, something closer to a sledgehammer than a light buzz. He finishes his drink carefully, but it ambushes him all the same, and he pushes his credit chip at the bartender with a grin that makes his teeth hurt. 

He’s about to go back to his room, when someone appears at his elbow with a drink in each hand. He introduces himself as an associate of the man from dinner, and Poe is immediately stunned stupid by the way he looks - this man is beautiful, holomodel beautiful, far too beautiful to be a government bean counter. The General said to have fun, so Poe buys this man a drink in return, loosens his collar, takes the bean counter associate of their dinner companion back to his room to help him get out of his uniform. It does have a lot of fiddly buttons, after all.

He wants to blame this brazenness on the drink, but his hands are steady when he unlocks the door and pulls his new friend inside. 

As per his orders, Poe does keep his uniform on throughout the whole act, and he finds he likes the headspace it puts him in. It keeps him focused on the greater picture, he thinks of Leia in the next room and hopes that she can’t hear the moment he chokes on the bean counter’s cock, the way he moans like a cheap Del’vanian whore when he gets a strong hand in his hair, the way he defiles his uniform just from the pressure of a fat cockhead against his gag reflex.

He doesn’t get the bean counter’s name, but he does get some information from him about how the deal is a go. They don’t actually kiss until he’s leaving, and it is a soft, wet afterthought of a kiss, languid, sweet, like an apology.

Next door, where Leia is curled up on top of her covers in the balmy evening air, she hears the whole thing as a succession of muffled sounds - the thump of the door, some low conversation followed by the thump of knees on the floor, a succession of groans and choking sounds, a shout, short and illegible, and then the bang of the door closing hard in the draft from an open window - and she smiles into her book. 

* * *

In the transport back Poe keeps his eyes forward and hopes that the General will stay in the back with her reports this time, but she comes and sits up front with him again.

“Did you have a nice time last night?” she asks, smiling at him with teasing knowledge shining in her eyes. It makes her look young, like she could be his peer instead of his commander.

“I did, ma’am, thank you,” he says, trying to keep his voice neutral, devoid of any suspicious emotion.

She stretches her legs out, relaxing into the worn leather of the chair. Her feet rest just on the edge of the control panel. She’s taken off her shoes, and looks thoroughly relaxed.

“Was the dinner productive?” he asks, to fill the silence.

She huffs a bit, waving her hands around. “The dinner was tedious, and who knows if they’re going to sign. These people have never let their guard down in any negotiation I’ve ever been part of. Even back in the old days of the Senate they never showed their cards once." She huffs out a breath. "Infuriating.”

Poe swallows around the sudden lump in his throat as he has a vivid flash of warm skin, pale fingers in his hair and the murmur of post-coital small talk.

“Well, I don’t know if it is anything, ma’am, but I spoke to the envoy’s assistant at the bar. We didn’t speak all that much, ma’am, but he did say that they were going to approve the deal.”

She smiles, and it’s genuine. “That is good to hear. Thank you. You may have a knack for this diplomacy thing after all. In fact, I think you might be a natural.”


	2. But Misfortune Is!! in the presence of God

In the language of irresponsible people the galaxy over, the first one was free. It wasn’t that she expected him to fail; Leia Organa wasn’t a legend through being unnecessarily reckless, but she hadn’t expected him to do quite so well his first time. They would have been fine if it hadn’t gone through, and she doesn’t discount how much she contributed to the situation, but when the confirmation came through the following week that the money had cleared into their accounts, the knot in her chest unfurled a bit. Her instincts about him were right. 

Even before she knew, Leia let herself take pleasure in watching him as they flew back to D’Qar, idly wondering what she would feel if she stretched out and touched his mind, what she would find there if she could read it properly, the way Luke always threatened to teach her to. The way Poe carries embarrassment is nothing like the way Han would when she first met him, all prickly and hostile and obvious, but the similarities are there in the way he wants to please her, wants her to want him, and it is good, very good.

The infatuation of the young is always something she can use.

She flicks open her holopad, her feet warm against the worn panelling, and looks over her diary for the next few months. There are a few more fundraising missions to planets that would work, but the temptation to go too fast with this is almost too much. Just because he did well the first time, doesn’t mean that she can trust him yet to behave how she wants once she takes the threat of her disapproval away. He still could use more training at least.

It’s not that she doesn’t have utmost faith in his loyalty, but young men are often prone to developing inconvenient ideas.

So, despite the precariousness of their situation, over the next three months she takes him on four entirely chaste missions, and at each one she shows him off in his lovely new uniform and the beautiful way he hangs on her every word specifically in order that word get out that Leia Organa has a new assistant, that he is lovely, and that he is her _favourite_ , a word that in basic means something precious, but in the tongues of the outer rim means something entirely different.

She doesn’t hear from Han for months, which is customary, and when he does it’s a short message. “I hope you know what you’re doing, Princess.”

* * *

For the most part, being Leia’s diplomatic apprentice is exactly what she had indicated, a tedious mixture of private bodyguard and personal pilot. Poe was worried after that first mission that he had blown it, both literally and figuratively, but there’s no real indication that he’s stopped being favoured, so in time, he lets himself relax. It takes a few months, but even he can see that he’s good at this. He’s got better at noticing things, at pushing down his insecurities and pulling up the cloak of professionalism and calmness that Leia seems to have silently bestowed upon him. He feels himself growing into the space she’s made for him in her world.

His first solo mission happens because Leia is called away to answer for something to the Senate. She is fuming when she calls him into her palatial office, stalking up and down the carpet while Threepio hurries along behind her, worrying at her in an eternal loop.

“It’s not that I don’t trust you, Poe” she says as he looks at the briefing documents she’s left strewn over her desk. “In fact, I know you’ll cope fine on your own. Plumeria’s an old friend, this is really no more than a formality, but the Senate are doing this on purpose to try and undermine us and I have to go there in person and remind them that I am exactly what they used to whisper about.” She finishes pacing and throws herself down into her chair again, purses her lips and slides her reading glasses onto the bridge of her nose. She looks over them at him, and sighs. “Promise me, Poe, you won’t go into politics?”

He salutes. “No, Ma’am. If you want, I can fly you to Hosnia? I haven’t got any scheduled missions for a few days.”

She smiles at him, and waves her hand at him “No, no, I would never do that to Plu. Go. I’ll get someone else to take me. I don’t need a bodyguard at the Senate, they’re all perfectly content to settle for metaphorically stabbing me in the back.”

It turns out that he needs to leave almost immediately, and so spends the short hop over shoving a ration in his mouth and trying to read the briefing documents where he’s spread them out over the control panel. He is thankful that he gets stuck in a holding pattern waiting for clearance to land, which at least allows him to learn the pronunciation of his contact’s name before he lands. 

He is late, and he needs to get to the other side of the city in record time. He arranges to meet his contact at the hotel bar where he’s staying, assuming he’ll be take to meet with the mysterious Plumeria from there, and so barely ducks into the fresher beforehand to smooth down his hair and gather himself before he goes to find his contact. He never had much of a casual wardrobe - he was rarely out of uniform for the first few years in the Republic except to sleep, and defecting meant leaving everything but the clothes on his back behind, and those things left behind he assumes were posted back to his father. He has a jacket that only gets better with age, a flattering shade of brown and impossibly soft, and enough vaguely fashionable civvies to be presentable as long as it’s not for more than three days. 

His orders from Leia were vague and the briefing notes were not much better, but the basics were that the envoy from Ffng has some information about pirates operating in her jurisdiction who could be open to doing some smuggling for the Resistance. 

His contact turns out to be the Envoy herself. Vice demi-Hierarch Plumeria del’Aks, tall and dark-skinned but with bright white hair, so white he cannot tell if it’s because of age or fashion that she wears it that way. She is impossibly statuesque, and he feels dwarfed by her when she sits down, even more so when she starts to talk, and it turns out she has that dominating passion that makes her seem to take up even more space than she already does.

She reminds him of Leia, in that way.

They hit it off easily, and she is happy to help the resistance. Leia probably gave this to him as his first solo diplomatic mission precisely because it would be this easy, he tells himself, but as she goes to pass him the data chip that contains the contact codes for the pirates, she doesn’t let go, and uses the momentum to pull him forward and off his bar stool, right into her bosom.

When he lifts his face after a moment too long, she is grinning at him, and palms the datachip out of sight so she can take his hand and lead him out of the bar.

He’s not by any stretch of imagination inexperienced, but with women, well, it was always easier to go with the genitals he already had a good grasp on, so to speak.

By the time he makes it back to his shuttle, he is definitely a lot more familiar with the humanoid woman’s anatomy and the ways that Plumeria can climax on his fingers and tongue. 

She was generous as well, she explained that not all women respond the same way. So her three handmaidens also graciously volunteered to help him with his education.

The pirates get made on their first smuggling mission, but when Leia sends him on her behalf to meet with the Queen of Carosha, he feels a lot more confident in his abilities.

* * *

Not every encounter is as enlightening as the one with Plumeria. They are called to a diplomatic concordance on a planet where women like Leia have handmen who kneel for them in symbolic prostration. When the host asks if he will take her right or left, Leia looks like she’s going to burst out laughing, but Poe looks around for the most powerful woman in the room and then sinks on the same side as her handman, as gracefully as one only can on a young man’s knees, and keeps one eye on the host’s handman’s pose all through extensive trade negotiations. 

The handman catches his eye and smirks at him over his mistress’ elbow. It is not a nice smirk. He’s wearing diaphanous trousers that hint at impropriety but he is far more attentive than Poe ever would be, and provides some numbers he claims to have calculated in his head that are astromech-level extrapolations. Poe feels a stab of something in his heart, but it’s not enough to counter the slowly increasing stabbing pains in his knees.

The negotiations go well, but just as Poe starts to think he’s got away with it without lasting damage, a tea service is brought out, and it’s all he can do not to grimace and groan. 

“To celebrate our good work today, General” the host says. “Seven symbolic teas to represent the seven principles of good business. You will pour for us first, as honoured guest?”

The teas are astringent and leave Poe thirsty, and each cup has a little snippet of a poem that goes along with it that speaks of the importance of strong marketing plans and zero-waste production. It is ridiculous, but the thirst helps to take his mind off the tender ache in his kneecaps, throbbing in time with his heartbeat.

After the final cup, they let him up for a break, and he tries to surreptitiously run through all the physical therapy routines he’s been taught for hard landings away in some quiet corner, stretching out cramping muscles against the wall, thumbs pressed too hard into pressure points until he can’t hide his whimpers. 

Leia comes and gets him when it is time for the formal dinner. She touches his lower back, and asks if he’s okay, and it should be comforting, but her touch only serves to remind him of the damage kneeling for so long has done to him. When they enter the hall, the low tables and the spacing of the chairs show that he’s expected to kneel through dinner. The floor is unforgiving stone, cold and uneven and he almost cries in frustration when he sees it. Instead, he feels Leia’s hand stroke against his spine in a soothing pattern, as if calming a bolting animal.

He makes it only an hour before he grits a pained cry between his teeth as he leans forward to fill Leia’s glass, at which point Leia mutters something to herself and flags down one of the assistants and asks them for a chair. 

“You need only have asked, Honoured General Organa,” they reply, and the chair that’s bought is padded and wide. It reminds him of the kind of bed you would buy for a beloved pet, but he climbs in eagerly. The food he is served is bland but comforting compared the the wonderful smells coming off Leia’s plate, but all he can think of is how much he wants to climb under the table and just lie down and never get up again.

He isn’t so lucky. When he accompanies Leia back to her quarters, much more stiffly than usual, she tells him to wait while she goes inside. Parade rest is far too painful to assume right now, so he decides the uniform won’t be too insulted if he leans against the wall.

He can hear Leia talking inside, presumably on the comm, but if she had someone in there, it wouldn’t really be Poe’s place to judge.

She returns a few minutes later with an apologetic look in her eyes and a single pale pink pill on her palm. 

“I’m very sorry Poe, but I need you to go meet with someone for me. This will help with the pain. I promise if this goes well, you’ll never have to kneel like that again. I would do it myself, but they don’t allow women of my standing to talk to men here.” She shakes her head, sadly.

He acquiesces with a wince, declaring it’s not so bad, dry-swallows the pill, and goes down to find his mark.

Leia’s contact is a mean bastard of a minister, the kind who resents not running the place. He bitches about the ‘ridiculous kneeling business’ for an hour, adopting Poe as a kindred spirit in knee-focused oppression. The minister is older but he still has it a little, making the most of it with a well cut suit and slicked-back hair and the kind of strong features that age well, plus a smile that lights his face up in a way Poe has always found compelling. When the minister propositions him, puts a warm hand deliberate and soft on one sore knee, Poe just goes with it, partly just so he can lie down. The pill Leia gave him has made him loose and sweet with the heady feel of pain relief, and that, combined with the alcohol he put away, first over dinner and then here at the bar, has made him feel reckless. The weather is apparently terrible, absolutely no way they’ll be able to leave atmo until well into the afternoon, and so even though he’ll hurt tomorrow, even though he’s tired and maybe a little addled, he lets the doubts wash away as the minister sweeps a long-fingered hand down the length of his spine. 

They don’t go to Poe’s room, instead the minister speaks to the concierge and they’re then climbing to a private elevator, and the room he’s engaged is finer than Leia’s, which doesn’t seem fair, as she is the guest of honour.

This time he doesn’t need to wait around for sweet nothings passed over crumpled bedsheets to get intelligence - the minister passes Poe a data chip, “for your mistress, I could not give it to her at dinner, had to make a performance of it, you understand why” when they’re barely through the door, and touches his cheek softly enough after that it feels like a kiss. There is no actual kissing, the minister definitely thinks he is a piece of discreet rough, but he is gentle, finds Poe a better pillow for his knees before pushing on his head a little harder than necessary until Poe sinks down into the warm feeling of doing a job well.

Leia doesn’t acknowledge the datachip he leaves on her sideplate at breakfast, but it disappears between bites, and later that month he takes a large freighter to one of that planet’s moons and can barely make it back, it is so overladen with aftermarket blasters and other anonymous forms of weaponry.

* * *

Poe makes Major in the spring, when an existing Major dies in a freak accident involving an unmapped gravity well. 

Poe hadn’t done much for Leia over the D’Qarian winter. She had been locked away with the other Generals in planning meetings, and so he ended up rotated back into the air corps for months of uninterrupted shifts for the first time in nearly two years. He flew several successful missions, really busted his ass in all aspects of the job, and was really making a difference. The commander of his squadron was the one who put him up for it, but on the citation form for his promotion the reason was given as being ‘for exemplary diplomatic service under pressure’ and it makes him wonder, a bit, that maybe this whole quiet period was some perverse form of compensation. 

* * *

He doesn’t know whether Leia knows that he is doing it. He thinks she does, though she never explicitly asks him to do more than to look after some people, to use his diplomatic training as needed, but at the end of every mission, even as he hands over the spoils of whore to her, he feels like he’s failing, like he is missing something, some part of a greater picture. Everytime he gets down on his knees or bends over the edge of a nameless hotel bed he feels the distance between them widen, that to resort to this is failure incarnate. He has no actual evidence that she doesn’t want him doing it, but he wants so much to say something, get some form of confirmation that he is doing what she wants.

He plots how he’ll tell her he doesn’t want to do this any more a hundred times, plans to tell her all his most deepest, darkest fantasies of dying gloriously in battle, becoming nothing but stardust and memory, that he wants to earn his promotion in the cockpit, not with his cock, but the time never seems right. For how close they are, how much time they spend together, they have little time when they are not acutely aware of the formality of their relationship.

Maybe if he had got drunk, or just got the courage, the outcome would have been different, but instead, the breaking point came unexpectedly. They were at the Galactic Symposium, the most important meeting in the galaxy, the place where countless wars had been averted through the right words being spoken to the right people. It wasn’t some fancy dinner and it wasn’t under the cover of darkness, instead, he was in a bright atrium under the searing-bright light of a triple star. 

The general had been cornered by a small group who were doing a good job of making a pitch for whatever they were selling - speaking in a fast, idiomatic language he could only understand every other word of, but Leia takes it all in nodding along and smiling periodically, and then replying in a short burst. The group wasn’t due to be meeting with her according to both the official and unofficial schedules Poe had memorised for this trip, so he assumes they’re the kind of people who see an opportunity and go for it. Leia likes those kind of people. 

The majority of the group go with Leia into the luncheon when the bell goes, but when Poe bends down to pick up their bags and follow, he is instead cornered by two people who position themselves between him and the now closed door.

They are a beautiful pair, a man and a woman, ostentatiously so in their gender performance. They’re wearing the uniforms of the military caste that are all show and no substance, far tighter still than his ridiculous diplomatic dress uniform, and near-encrusted with medals that shine too brightly to be real. 

“Major Dameron”, the male one oozes, walking a well manicured finger up his arm. “I find that my companion and I are not quite yet ready for luncheon.” His basic is heavily accented in a way Poe hasn’t heard before.

His companion nods sincerely, all wide eyes and a pouty lower lip, her blouse perilously tight.

Poe clears his throat. “Well, it has been a long morning for myself and the General, and -”

“Oh, we cleared it with her,” the female one insists. “She said that you should attend to us first. We have heard _so_ much about you, and about what the Resistance can offer us. The General said you were the best liaison she has ever had.”

His stomach growls, and the man laughs and takes one of the bags from his hand. “That settles it, come, In our culture, it is good luck to do business on an empty stomach. Shall we? The welcome-meet will hold your bags until you can check in.”

They have a lovely suite overlooking the city that is accessed in a tiny glass cylinder that pushes you gently up along the outside of the building like being blown along a drinking straw. It turns out that his new friends are corrupt customs officials - they control significant smuggling channels into the city, and they are thinking of turning their ill-begotten dirty money into nice clean Resistance support, should the price be right. 

“We’ve heard that the Resistance can be very persuasive,” the woman, Damia, says. She is very close, and she smiles in a way that doesn’t reach her eyes.

Poe shifts. His diplomatic senses, while nascent, are screaming that this is not a good place to be, but Leia approved it, and it would be wrong to be rude to them. Instead he says, “I don’t make money decisions, Damia. That’s down to General Organa.” 

“Perhaps you have something else you can offer us?” she says, and with just a flick of one long fingernail, the promise of her overstuffed blouse is realised.

“Oh,” Poe says, in a small voice, as she takes his hands and puts them on her breasts. Plumeria and her handmaidens were beautiful nude, but these are just, they are unlike any breasts he’s ever encountered.

The man, Casto, presses against his back. “Are they not fabulous? Surely you would like a taste, Poe? You were so hungry when we were downstairs.” 

Tentatively, Poe stretches his fingers out against Damia’s swollen flesh. His fingers are cold under the harsh atmospherics of the room, and Damia shivers.

* * *

He limps back into the conference nearer to dinner than he expected. They had been hard on him, selfish lovers despite the coquettishness of their seduction. Exhausted and knowing that he looks like he’s been fucked hard and put away wet and smells about as good as that sounds, he takes his place, gingerly, at Leia’s side. 

Leia doesn’t look at him for nearly twenty minutes, not until the bell goes and they break for dinner, and every moment breaks his heart a little. He feels disgusting and angry that he didn’t go and clean up before coming to her, and there’s no way she didn’t notice. He saw himself both before and after he entered Damia and Casto’s quarters and he looked more debauched than he had in a long time, probably more so than he did when she actually caught him getting fucked all those years ago. There’s something about a ruined dress uniform that is more exposing than actual nudity. 

“General, please, I’m not feeling so hot,” he says, when they finally call an end to the day’s symposium. 

Instead she takes his hand in a vice-like grip, muttering harshly, “No, I need you here. It won’t take long.”

She lets him retreat for a few minutes to the fresher, where he tries gamely to press the wrinkles from his uniform with the hand dryer and the flat of his hand. His hair is on the wrong side of rakish, and he has distinct red marks all over his neck and he can feel the scratches on his back beneath the rough wool of his tunic. His undershirt was sacrificed by Casto to keep his legs where he wanted them as he drove into him, while Damia bounced herself to another orgasm on his dick. 

He feels the flutter of the first quick pulse of panic, and steps away from the mirror and into the stall. The sex wasn’t bad. They were extremely attractive people, and it was eye opening in a good way, but oh god, this is work, he knows now that this is part of what Leia expects of him, and this is important, more important than anything else. It is part of what he has to offer, and he has always done so willingly, but he had assumed that he needed to be discreet, and his appearance this afternoon is the furthest thing from it.

He manages to get himself together, and after a quick scrub with handsoap he at least feels less like he’s obviously smothered in slick and spunk, but when he goes to rejoin Leia, he realises just a moment too late that she’s talking to Damia and Casto, and that the three of them have seen him. They’re laughing, and shaking hands, and Poe goes cold.

“Thank you for lending us Poe,” Casto says when Poe finally manages to get his feet to move across the plush carpet to join them. “He is as fine a _negotiator_ as you had indicated.” 

Damia nods her agreement. She is missing a button from her blouse. 

The general laughs her Leia laugh, the easy one that says she is in on the joke. “Does this mean we have a deal? I would have hated to waste Poe’s _talents_ for nothing.”

Damia smiles widely. “Oh yes, General. Of course. We wouldn’t dream of messing you around after you’d been so generous. I’m sure other members of our cadre would be very excited to meet Poe for a similar presentation, if you would want to arrange a meeting?”

It is the leer that gets him. They’re at the Galactic Symposium, surrounded by the chief decision-makers of the galaxy, and Damia is looking at him like he’s a piece of meat and the General is going along with it, appraising him, smiling with everything but her eyes, and negotiating for him like he is just meat and he feels suddenly so sick he can barely stand.

He excuses himself, and walks and walks and walks until he is on the other side of his door and its four locks. He shakes himself in the shower until he feels something in his head come loose, orders dinner service, takes a pill and goes to sleep. If Leia comes by, he doesn’t hear her.

The following morning he still feels deeply unsettled, but they’re flying home, the skies clear and not a solar wind on the scopes. He doesn’t know what Leia did with her evening, whether she managed to stick to her twin schedules and make the deals that they needed to make. They don’t do any more than exchange pleasantries until they’re back on D’Qar. Leia stays in the back, and only the faint rustle of paper reminds him that she’s still there.

Leia is firm with him at the debriefing. It isn’t a dressing down, but it feels like one. 

“You get two extra days’ leave with your promotion”, she scolds, “though god knows why we give them to you, as you never use them. This time, though, I insist. You need to take some time.” She’s harsh, but there’s a kindness behind it that hurts, just a little. There is so much both of them aren’t saying. They should just say it. He can feel it rising inside him, all the things he wants to say, but instead he just salutes, and leaves her office with only gratitude on his lips.

Leia gives him special leave to take a transport and get off the planet, and he is so tempted to take the unmarked shuttle and just run, run to where he’ll never be found, defect again, but instead he goes to the Commander and throws himself on his mercy with a carefully edited story of bureaucratic cockblocking. In no time, he has plans to use teach the newest recruits comms and cyphers, as someone else is already halfway through flight instruction. It is mindless work no one enjoys, but Poe ignores his issues best when performing, and teaching has always involved a lot of that.

The Resistance uses fairly basic cyphers, preferring to stay as quiet on the radio waves as possible. They know that the Order can read their transmissions fairly soon after they send them, and so the Resistance got smart about how they communicate, hiding in plain sight, in the normal transmissions of the holonet. When flying missions, they mostly communicate through the encryption modules in their astromech droids, which are generally advanced enough that they don’t have to worry, as long as they’re not broadcasting all their most secret plans out into space. Their myriad band of droids are better at communicating across their various dialects of binary, switching between them at random intervals that they seem to have worked out themselves. It isn’t entirely foolproof, but it is good enough.

The First Order, by comparison, seemingly broadcasts their every move into the deepest, darkest corners of the galaxy with no concern for espionage. For all the precautions the Resistance takes, the main issue they have is finding a frequency that the Order isn’t already broadcasting on. 

When the Resistance first cracked the cipher, right at the beginning of its formation, it seemed like maybe they were being given a gift. The words that were decrypted were definitely in basic, and even looked like sentences. However, they were gibberish. They followed no pattern. There were no such thing as short messages, everything was an essay, transmitted in beautiful, florid language. No matter how much progress they made trying to crack what was being said, they got nowhere, over and over again. The only time they managed to crack one message was when a shuttle was returning from dead space, and was out of sync. They spent months on it, countless processing hours of droid time, and it decrypted, ultimately, to ‘over and out’.

Still, it is the responsibility of everyone to dedicate their spare droid processing time to the cryptography battle, and it is while he’s teaching Loren Candra how to run transmissions through the latest version of the cobbled-together translation software, BB-8 whistles and Poe looks at the highlighted places in the output and notices something he’s never seen before. He calls over the lead cryptographer to confirm, and there it is, a pattern in the strange poetry that the First Order transmissions uselessly decrypt to.

There’s a running book in the officers’ mess of the most beautiful and strange First Order poems, and there’s occasionally a dramatic reading or three performed at the base open mic. Poe has always had a soft spot for them, and it’s that reason that he stays late into the night with the lead cryptographer and her rapidly growing team who are pouring over BB-8, listening to him run his own decryption algorithms to try and brute-force them, bleeping the output quietly to himself to the tune of the Hosnian pop charts.

The next shift comes on, and one of the techs groans, “Poe, can you mute your droid? I hate this song.”

_“But Misfortune Is!! in the presence of God and oppositional s/he might march into a ghost,In spite of a twelve months’ greatest during, I wasn’t gotten the ID Card from you,moreover the acknowledgment of it(A small paper) was to misplace anywhere”_ BB-8 sings, and then another droid pings, and another, and all is forgotten as the room explodes and there it is: a pattern, and within the pattern, a message. But more than just a message, a chance.

* * *

The General has this enormous office that looks out over a lush private courtyard, with huge doors carved with the ancient arcane script of the lost language of D’Qar. When Poe knocks on them they echo through the empty hallways. The General keeps her support staff in the situation room, she has no need for a gatekeeper when she has doors like these.

He enters on her call, and stands at ease before her.

“What can I do for you, Major,” she says. Her voice is scratchy, like she has been screaming, and it sounds like every word hurts to grind out.

“We have received some interesting intel, ma’am. I’d like permission to pursue it.”

Leia looks up, taking off her reading glasses. Even from his place across the room Poe can see that her eyes are red, like she’s been crying. It’s impossible that she knows what he’s brought. He is the only person who has left the cryptographic suite in nearly 12 hours. There’s a top secret folder lying on her desk, but it is closed. He wants to know what has made her so emotional.

“You’re on leave, Major. I remember telling you this myself.”

It’s only when she waves at him that he realises she’s not kicking him out.

“Ma’am, there is fresh intelligence that Kylo Ren is transferring to a new star cruiser in the next 36 hours. I believe that this gives us an essential window where he will be in open space with only minimal protection, near the planet of Jakku. I can take a small attack squad, and I believe we have a very good chance to -” he pauses, because she’s honest-to-god laughing at him. It’s not a mirthful laugh, the kind he hears occasionally when her husband is back on base. It’s sharp, like needles, full of derision.

“Denied, Major.” she says, shortly.

“But General, Ma’am, _Leia_ -” he pleads, approaching the desk. “I can get him back! I know it!”

The General pushes back her chair and stands. “Major Dameron, I thought we had finally fucked all that wide-eyed idealism out of you after the symposium, but obviously not. Do you honestly think that we have the capability to go and capture the right-hand man of the leader of the First Order? What would you expect us to do with him afterwards, lock him up and _love_ the dark side out of him? Do you think that I’m so weak as to drop all the plans, the plans I’ve spent decades working on, to get back the overpowered brat my son turned into? Is that what you think of me? This is wartime, Major. The galaxy is balanced on a knife-edge and you come to me with petty, idealistic crap like that?”

She walks ‘round to him, focused on him so intently he feels rooted to the spot, unable to move. “Are you going to bring back my husband next?” she snarls, low and tight. “Is it because I’m a woman that you think I would waste personnel on the personal? We are going to lose this war, Poe Dameron, even if we do everything right. By the time I was your age I had seen my planet destroyed, been tortured by my own father, commanded and lost more idealistic young men than I can count to the dark side, but somehow, we thought we had won. I thought my place in history was set. I had a family, thinking it was safe, but of course, it wasn’t. Evil is relentless, Major, it has taken more than the good has ever given us. It has infinite capacity to spread into every crack in the galaxy, into the brains of right-thinking people and corrupt them.”

She laughs again, that awful, mirthless laugh. “You know, when I met you I knew you were special. You had this light, I’d never felt anything like it. I said to them you were incorruptible, so we could use you for more than just cannon fodder. Did you know that? I fought so hard to stop you dying on some routine errand. Any fool with an astromech can fly an x-wing, can even fly it well, but it takes a special person to suck off a corrupt bureaucrat for money and convince himself that it’s for the greater good.”

He is moving before he can even think, and then he has her arms gripped in his fists, has her pressed against her desk. She’s defiant, unafraid, despite how tiny she is, how fragile her bones feel underneath his fists. “Don’t feel bad,” she whispers, and he can see the snarl, the legend only whispered about. “The reports were quite complimentary. You were especially useful on your _knees._ ”

Something buckles in his mind, and his knees follow. He smooths his hands down her skirts until he’s kneeling, and then he’s pushing them up, pulling down her underwear, and she pulls herself up onto the desk so he’s at the optimal level to get his mouth on her.

He had fantasised about this so many times, how maybe one day he would be called to service her and how he would rise to the occasion, really show his appreciation for all she’s done for him, give her the best fuck of her life. In the pathetic kernel of his mind she would be grateful, that she would be wet and open and want him so much she wouldn’t be able to breathe.

He gets her there; by the time his knees start hurting she is breathing heavily above him, her cunt wet and swollen into agonising sensitivity and he worries her perfect clit between his lips softly. Plumeria taught him well. He is drowning in her taste, his chin drying tacky from where he used his stubble to tease her the way he learned from the Queen of Carosha. By the time she comes silently (but he knows the very moment it starts to build, tracks the entire process of her orgasm as it consumes her body) he has used every trick he has learned on her, shown her his worth first hand.

He moves to stand when she gasps out, her legs twitching from overstimulation, her eyes closed for a moment, but his legs are wobbly and he needs to grip the edge of the desk to remain upright. The humiliation has made him harder than he has ever been in his life and it hurts, physically and emotionally, even the palm of his own hand against his dick is not pleasurable, gone through to the other side. He feels helpless, on the edge of a panic attack. He feels like he is dying.

“General, please,” he grits out through clenched teeth.

Her skirts are still resting on her thighs a few inches from her hipbones, and she pats his white-knuckled hands and moves to undo his trousers, and spreads her legs for him to move between them.

He fucks her fast, animalistic and too-rough, and the whole time she looks disappointed in him. At least it doesn’t last long - he comes inside of a minute, choking into the air between them.

He fumbles back, pulling his trousers up and then the rest of him into parade rest, like the good soldier he wants to be, staring at a point three inches above her left ear.

“Dismissed, _Commander,_ ” she says, and there it is, there’s the battlefield promotion he had always wanted to earn under firefight, poisoned, and with that the final part within him breaks.

It’s still afternoon and the rest of the crew are out on drills and so at least the barracks is quiet, and he manages to hold it together just long enough to get into his bunk, pull the curtains across, before he starts to cry.

He begs off the evening with illness, and sleeps for a full day. He only wakes because someone is sent to get him for sitrep. 

The General nods at him when he enters. “Excellent timing, Commander. We have received intelligence from Lor San Tekka that the map to Luke Skywalker may be on Jakku.”

She turns to him. “There’s been talk that there is significant First Order traffic in that area, so it is imperative we slip under the radar. We need our best pilot to take this one. Are you up for it?”

It feels like a gift, but he knows it isn’t. This is a suicide mission dressed up in favouritism. This is his deathwish made flesh, and like most things deeply yearned for, he realises that it could never hold up to the fantasy of being asked to die for what he believes in.

“It will be my honour, General.” he says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Once again, a billion kudos and thanks to artifactrix for coping with my terrible writing habits of not knowing how to use apostraphes and leaving plot holes just lying around. She is wonderful. Any remaining errors are 100% my own.


	3. Minimum Operating Parameters

It seems strange that just a few days ago the galaxy was a different place, that it is even possible, even in the vastness of space, for so many things to happen in such a short space of time. In many ways, it was a simpler place, in that way war strips everything back to basics, life or death, success or failure. 

In others, it was complex, like a human heart, or an unspoken promise. 

Poe felt that his problems were somehow at the very centre of of the galaxy’s problems, woven into their weft, inseparable. 

But now…

But now…

But _now…_

He’s seen things. It’s not just that he nearly died, that was always a very real possibility, knowing what he knew. He went into his mission knowing that to succeed was to return to that liminal place he’s been living in, unsure of himself and his place in the universe, acting according to programming like a top of the market droid.

There was a moment, when Kylo Ren was looking at him, all snarling mask and dramatic cape, so unlike the tiny picture of a smiling teenager Leia keeps in her overnight bag, where his heart was in his throat waiting for the stormtroopers to return with BB-8, smashed to smithereens, that a small part of him thought that he was pretty smart, to be about to die tragically and heroically, but without actually failing his mission. It’s a horrible voice, a nasty voice, one that dreams in terms of the glorious Dameron name rather than about who they were as people. One who wants glory, an easy escape from his problems, and for his sharp edges to be forgotten.

Instead, he’s alive, but maybe not entirely in the realm of the living. So many firsts for this year, the first time he’s been tortured, given into the pain safe in the knowledge he has nothing to give, knowing that he has been left for dead, because there’s no way the Resistance will be able to come for him. Then, with a shock of cold water, a first act twist straight out of an action holo, there’s a thrilling rescue at the hands of a defecting enemy, and that alone, that story of his failed mission and the man who saved him, that would be the defining story of his life, the thing he’d tell his grandkids, if he ever had them. 

But oh no, it turns out he gets back, gets straight into a new X-Wing they paint black for him, and by the end of the next day he’s a war hero. He blew up something ten times bigger than the Death Star of legend, he killed a million people with just his rudder and trigger and gave the heavens back their stolen star. 

No one will ever forget him. There’s talk of even naming the fucking star after him.

This kind of iconic status, this was what he had always dreamed of. He looked up to Leia most of all, but also to Han, Luke, Lando and Chewie, the legends of his childhood, because of what they did and what they stood for. Now, a new generation of kids are going to be fighting over who gets to be Poe Dameron in schoolyard games, as certainly as they will make the fat kid be the Starkiller.

And then just as soon as the war starts, spreading like fire across the galaxy, it stops. The message comes in almost as soon as the remains of the Resistance get back to base - the First Order wish to negotiate a cease-fire.

* * *

When Poe gets the news he can’t actually believe it. He can’t. Everyone around him is whooping in excitement and relief and he wants to scream at them that it’s not peace, it’s a cease-fire, a temporary cessation of hostilities, time for both sides to build more ships and recruit more warm bodies and then it will resume, the endless battle between good and evil, recursive until the universe consumes itself in an impossible ball of gravity and fire.

Even if he had, his screams would have fallen on deaf ears. There is far too much power in even an atom of hope.

Less than week ago Poe was formulating a plan to save his boss’ wayward son while consumed with the knowledge that his boss had been deliberately whoring him out for the greater good, and now, a week later, Kylo Ren and his mother are at the point of sitting at a table together. Or at least their representatives are, who knows if Ren or whoever is running the First Order actually will come to the table, but Leia has gone away on a transport piloted by Admiral Statura, fuelled by good faith and packing enough firepower to level a small planet, to oversee the negotiations. He hadn’t been able to speak to her in the short hours when she wasn’t grieving her husband and planning the war. It makes him feel off balance, listless, crushed under all the unknown unknowns that now represent their relationship.

In her absence, the command structure vanishes that first night after the cease-fire. It takes Poe twenty minutes to track them down, but they excuse him when he tries to join them, physically bar him from the door to the war room where they are sitting quietly, a bottle of whisky sitting between them, around scattered papers and model X-Wings. They aren’t having anything of his impotent desire to be debriefed, instead placating him. He’s a hero, they say. He should go out tonight and reap the benefits of his new status. “Go enjoy yourself, Poe,” Ackbar says, patting him hard on the shoulder. “This is your night.”

When he gets to the barracks, the party that has broken out is like a fight, unplanned and chaotic and unnecessarily violent. Alcohol has appeared from the backs of wardrobes, music is up loud, people are kissing in the hallways and from where he’s standing, babies are definitely being made tonight. 

He flashes back to Leia’s words, what she spat at him, vulnerable like a viper, and wants to pull people apart, tell them that the war isn’t over, tell them not to pin their happiness on this. A war baby is hard, he knows this from his own parents, but they always said they went into it knowing that he was going to grow up in wartime. His Dad always said that it was their friends, the one who made a peace baby who turned out to be a war baby, that really struggled, who ate themselves into nothingness from the inside trying to keep the war out.

Poe isn’t in the mood to celebrate, not even in the mood to fake it. It’s loud everywhere, people cheer as soon as they see him. He has a headache that is bordering on a migraine, his skin overstimulated and prickly, and so he walks himself to sickbay to throw himself on the mercy of the droids. He saw Doctor Kalonia dancing with her wife somewhere in the depths of the barracks, and so sickbay is staffed only by those who don’t have a concept of fun (BB-8, naturally, is off at the party.) He gets a pill from one, and then naturally gravitates to the corner where Finn is settled. 

Finn. In the midst of a war, here was this man, this deus ex machina who saved him from a horrible, ignoble death, someone to whom death wasn’t quite permanent, who rose from the ashes to put the pieces together to save all of their lives. Sure, there’s rumours that there’s a new jedi, someone who has inherited the Millennium Falcon and the burden of the hope the whole galaxy now holds that there can be something to the future other than superweapons and endless death, but Poe likes his hope to be pinned on something solid, and he’s felt how solid and real Finn is when he saw him wearing his jacket. The adrenaline of that moment, of the double take, the beat his heart skipped, will live on forever. There might be an opera hidden in what was barely a minute.

History will remember Finn as all those things, as someone brave and self-sacrificing and determined. Poe doesn’t want to remember him though. He wants to know him, for that to be just the first things on a long list of things he knows. 

He ends up sitting by Finn’s bed quietly, watching the gentle waves of his heartbeat crest on the monitor, the rhythm syncopating to the thudding of the pulse inside his own head, keeping him awake, if not alert. Finn’s chest rises slowly, driven by the tendrils of the life-support med-droid that is wrapped round him and inside him, keeping him alive and putting him back together.

His eyes drift shut, merely to rest, but then he’s jerking awake in the spiraling crash of the Tie Fighter, Finn yelling behind him, they’re going to die, but no, no, it’s over. They survived. “Commander,” the droid says from its control module somewhere near Finn’s knee, “there is a cot, if you would like to sleep. You are also free to go to your quarters. I am programmed to alert you if he is to wake.”

“Me?” Poe asks, surprised, heart still galloping in his chest.

“You are the acting operations commander in the absence of General Organa. She devolved this task to you. Have you not checked your assignations today?” 

Poe winces. Some droids have overenthusiastic thesauruses in their language modules and this droid is old-fashioned, possibly as old as Threepio, a specialised med droid they don’t make so many of anymore. The model was designed to be calming, shaped like a translucent sea creature in soft pastel glowing colours, and while it speaks in a soothing, vaguely feminine voice, it still manages to sound disapproving of his dereliction of duty. It reminds him, vaguely, of his preschool teacher. It also exudes a strangely sweet-smelling sticky mucus that is optimised for healing more severe wounds, but it does appear alarming the first time you see this giant squishy tentacle monster wrapped ‘round someone you love, sealing up their orifices with its extrusions. Poe’s been inside them a few times after his more horrible crashes, and you don’t really remember anything but a feeling of warmth, of deep relaxation, and a resurgence of primal womb-like memories, the echoing sounds of your parents talking, the strange, comforting presence of their love. He prefers the simplicity of the bacta tank or the fistfuls of antibiotics they would give him back home when he got sick. He’s too old and tired to be seduced by a fresh start.

The droid chirps a reminder tone, something he had removed from BB-8’s programming when he got him, but it does the job here, jolting him out of his reverie.

“I’m sorry, I’m very tired - what is your designation?”

“PRL-12,” PRL-12 replies.

“PRL-12 thank you, I think I will crash - sleep - here. Please continue your good work looking after Finn.”

PRL-12 beeps softly in acceptance. Poe rises, grabs a spare datapad and logs in and sees that yes, his rank is now listed as Acting-General (Commander), and he has a long list of responsibilities to take care of in Leia’s absence. 

A feeling of relief spreads through him, some of the itchy feeling from this sudden cease-fire relieved by the knowledge that he at least has something to do in the meanwhile. The tiredness takes over as this layer of adrenaline fades, and he feels himself slump. He mutes all the notifications and, after a brief mental calculation, drags the cot from its place in the corner to hidden on the other side of Finn’s bed and curls up like a child. The cot makes a horrible creaking noise, and the pillow is flat, but he can’t imagine getting any sleep in his quarters while the party rages on. People will no doubt be looking for him, and he wants to be uncharitable, but some will be genuinely wanting him to celebrate what should be good news. There will be others, however, looking for the good time he is always supposedly up for. There are probably people waiting for him in his bed, and so before he goes to sleep he rolls over and sets a filter on the personnel allowed into Finn’s room, Med-Droids and Generals only, before falling down into sleep.

He’s woken by BB-8, who somehow has managed to get himself classified as both a general and a med-droid in the permissions database and makes his displeasure at Poe not being in his sight all night known with loud beeping and some pointedly unco-ordinated navigation around the room. It is still dark, but that’s no excuse.

Poe pats him on the head, and pulls himself up. His head isn’t groggy anymore, and he feels genuinely well rested for the first time in several weeks, even if his muscles hurt from the non-existent support of the cot. 

His holopad says that he’s due in a holoconference with Leia and the rest of the makeshift command crew, and that according to the agenda he is the representative on D’Qar, the rest scattered wide across the nearby systems.

He gets a cup of Kalonia’s caf on his way out, BB-8 trundling behind him, burbling all the gossip from the night before, as if the party was just another one missed in the line of duty, the sun rising on what might as well be just another day.

* * *

BB-8 has decided that Poe needs to have a trusted deputy on the ‘Finn Situation’ as he doesn’t trust any of the med-droids ‘as far as I can roll them’. He’s also extremely good at getting underfoot, and so Poe plugs in his charging station underneath Finn’s bed so that he can more efficiently get in the way.

It is something of an open secret that Poe is not sleeping in his quarters these days. When he went back late in the morning the day after the cease-fire, there were three junior mechanics sleeping off their hedonism in his sheets, looking young and vulnerable and shockingly sweet with their messy hair and limbs soft in sleep. He doesn’t bother to move them, rationalises that his operations duties are initially focused on medical supplies and personnel, so when he isn’t in the hangar or the storehouses, he’s in there meeting with Doctor Kalonia and her senior diagnostic droids. He at least managed to find a better cot from somewhere, and the slow beeping of Finn’s respirator and the occasional whirr of PRL’s mechanisms are better for productive sleep than the usual background noises of the barracks.

PRL-12 is very good at her job, and also very good at telling BB-8 where to go when he gets on her wiring, and so it is barely a week later when she has healed Finn’s wounds both inside and out to the point where she is no longer connected to him at all. When she disengages from the last piece of wound care, she lets out a soft, mewling beep that brings the med-droids scurrying along, and sends BB-8 ricocheting across the base looking for him. 

When Poe and BB-8 return, a situation that was preceded by Poe having to climb down from the top recesses of the largest storehouse while BB-8 screamed at him to ROLL DOWN FASTER, Poe is immediately scared at how many of the droids and med-techs are clustered ‘round his bed, that maybe BB-8 had been mistaken and it wasn’t the good alarm after all, but it’s fine, it’s fine. Finn is groggy and half-asleep but PRL is nowhere to be seen, and his chest is rising and falling, his eyes cracked open, and when he sees Poe he smiles the way he did on the tarmac after the run on Takodana. 

The effort of that bright, megawatt smile seems to immediately take it out of him, and he drops back into sleep almost immediately, but Poe is so happy he thinks he’ll burst.

He has a meeting, and all the way through he keeps an eye on his notifications, willing them to stay empty until he can get back.

When he does, Finn is still breathing on his own, and when he leans forward his back is smooth and shiny but with new skin, not scar tissue. He is eating a bowl of the luridly coloured but inoffensively bland medi-soup and his hair is long, a side effect of the accelerated cell development PRL is designed for. It sticks straight up in places, a complex network of tight curls that Poe’s fingers itch to touch.

“Welcome, Poe Dameron,” PRL says. “You can see that Finn is finally above minimum operating parameters.” She is draped over him loosely, one sensor-tentacle wrapped round his wrist delicately, another pressed across his chest, rising and falling with each breath. 

Finn looks up and their eyes meet, and there’s a magic there, passing between them. 

“Hey buddy,” Poe says eventually, still unable to move from the doorway. 

Finn smiles as widely as his strength allows, and waves with his left arm. PRL-12 has stopped breathing for him, but he is obviously still exhausted.

“Hey,” he croaks out. His voice is soft and deep, as if emerging from cold storage. “How do I look?”

“Like a goddamn painting,” Poe replies. “I’m so glad you’re awake, you have no idea.”

Finn coughs and manages to gasp out ‘Thanks’, before PRL-12 starts beeping and pulsing a deep, resonant violet, and the med-droids come rolling in, pushing Poe out of the way. He watches from the doorway, biting his lip as the med-droids stabilise Finn and then work through their daily tasks, changing the sheets, cleaning his hands and face, all the time beeping to each other in the slow, echoing, complex binary they use to talk to each other, divorced from human language by a chasm no programmer likes to think about.

Poe stands there for hours, just watching. Every time Finn opens his eyes, his gaze is drawn to where Poe is. He blinks slowly, no doubt drugged to the gills, but even when he is slipping down into peaceful slumber, his head is tilted towards where Poe stands and silently watches, until PRL-12 tells him that he has achieved REM sleep.

“You should go achieve REM sleep yourself,” she says. 

“It’s fine, Pearl,” Poe says. “I’m not tired.”

“I have alerted BB-8 to your stubbornness.” PRL says. “He is right, you are a particular pain in the couplings. Life would be much easier if humans would just follow their programming.”

Poe returns to his quarters, meeting BB-8 on the way and enjoying his scolding for once. His rooms feel musty, and so he throws the windows open for the first time in weeks and gets into bed, feeling lighter than he has for a long time. He feels bold rather than tired, ready to do something impulsively constructive, something good. He grabs his datapad, wrapped in his comforter against the cool air, and looks at his list of assignments. The work of an Acting-General is long and arduous but not particularly time-sensitive, so there is always something to do. 

Classified tasks in the workflow are kept in a separate tab away from prying eyes. Poe has fallen out of the habit of looking there in the last couple of weeks , figuring anything at General level would likely all be at the same security clearance. When he has, it’s always been empty. However, this time, when he thumbs left to look at it, there is one message, direct from Leia herself, rather than from the automated task assignment bot that posts on her behalf.

It reads:

_“Dear Poe, I am sorry to delegate this task to you, especially after our last talk before your capture. I hoped to have this conversation in person, but alas, things never work out the way I hoped._

_I hear with pleasure that the stormtrooper you named Finn has survived his run-in with my son. We have given him clemency, but he needs enhanced debrief before we can clear him for full integration. Normally I would have our security officers do this, but he has bonded with you, and I do not wish to spook him unless he does decide to run off as he threatened to before. I cannot emphasise enough how much of an asset he could be to us if used correctly._

_However much it must pain you to do this, the future of the Resistance requires you to be the one to probe Finn for the information we require, and to ensure that he remains with us. I know I have asked much of you in the past, and I can sense how much this boy means to you. However, you and I are very much alike - the Resistance and the downfall of the tide of evil that plagues our galaxy must come before petty and selfish human desires. Be careful, and be kind, but nevertheless, be thorough._

_I trust that you will do the right thing, as you always have._

_Kindest Regards,_

_General Leia Organa”_

He drops the datapad softly onto the bed beside him, his good intentions sapped away with the subtext of the letter and the implications for what stretches out ahead of him, and spends a long time staring at the ceiling, trying not to think at all, until sleep rescues him from his thoughts.

* * *

When Finn is discharged a few days later, Poe takes responsibility for throwing the kind of cease-fire party that is suitable for someone who is recovering from a lightsaber to the back. It is also to keep the peace - there are a good number of people who are itching and need an outlet.

The accommodation for the Resistance corps is colloquially known as the barracks out of laziness of thinking of a better name, but it is far more akin to a warren than to any regimented place for a military force. It was partly built in the side of the hill initially, to provide protection if they were bombed, but as they’ve grown it has become integrated into the forest, new rooms built around the wide, squat, impossibly ancient trees that populate the planet of D’Qar. As a result, the rooms start out conventional and functional, but the deeper you get the stranger they become, organic and fractal and oddly beautiful, with additional alcoves for facilities dictated by the availability of the space rather than logic or need, and personal storage held near the tall ceilings in big nets that can be adjusted to lie low, or be kept up above head height. 

Finn is dumbfounded when he sees it, wandering through after Poe with his head whipping around to get a better look at the strange geometry of the place. 

“This is your barracks?” Finn asks, breathlessly, uselessly. “It’s beautiful.”

Poe’s heart does chime a bit, because of course it’s unlikely Finn ever saw many angles that weren’t right growing up, everything boxy and utilitarian and well ordered.

“Let me show you to your room.” Poe says, taking him by the hand and leading him further into the labyrinth.

Finn’s room is up on the third floor, small and curled in on itself, dominated by the huge branch making up part of the ceiling. The pale green leaves flutter under the environmental controls, content despite the unseasonal warmth. The one vaguely straight wall holds Finn’s bed, long and narrow but comfortable all the same, with an alcove for personal effects partly hidden by the pile of blankets that have been dumped on the mattress. The other wall slopes down into a built in snug, barely more than an alcove really, and there’s a table carved out of one of the dead branches of the tree poking through the wall. A small food prep area is laid out, a tiny gasless burner, a set of cups and a single shallow bowl that doubles as cookware.

The bathroom curls off the main room, with a sitting-bath taking up most of the space. Approximately hip height, it looks like a tiled jewel box with a wooden lid, and Poe is deeply covetous of it. 

“There are showers down the hall, but there wasn’t the height for one here,” Poe says to fill the silence. Finn is struck dumb, taking it all in, just nodding every time Poe says something, occasionally inspecting a few things. “The room’s a bit small, but it’s nice to be up high. You get to hear the birds. There’s one that makes comm sounds though, so be prepared for that, you aren’t going crazy.”

When Finn turns around, he’s never seen him smile wider. “It’s brilliant, Poe. I’ve never seen anything like it, and it’s _mine_.” 

Poe wants to say ‘let’s stay, forget the party, let’s just talk and get to know each other until you look at me like that’ and give in to the pull he feels between them, that he’s felt since the first time Finn let go of his arms back on the _Finalizer_ and set all this in motion. 

Instead he holds himself back, and opens the door for Finn to pass through in front of him. “Let’s get to the party, you have plenty of time to spend here in the future, I promise. Maybe you can find someone to help you break it in, eh? Housewarming is very important, you’ll learn this soon enough.” 

\--

They are set upon by the pilots the moment they get down into the bubbling hubbub of the party, and he loses Finn for a bit, borne away by a group who were chattering excitedly about his health. It’s far less riotous than he had feared, but the small social area is rammed near to bursting despite all those they lost during the attack on Starkiller, with people spilling out of all the hidden nooks and crannies, jammed three-abreast into the hammocks up near the ceiling. He is handed a bottle of something definitely home-brewed, takes a toke off something else that’s being passed round that he recognises by the rolling style to be Snap’s, and lets it all wash over him. He used to love this, used to love being down as much as being airborne, but there are so many people missing, it’s nearly overwhelming, how his brain searches the pattern of the crowd for familiar faces and comes up wanting every time. 

Even with the smoke and the spirits he doesn’t feel settled. It’s not just missing his friends, not just the magnitude of what he’s done, it’s him, it’s how he doesn’t feel like he belongs here anymore. The spell that bought him here in the first place no longer feels like magic, instead, the words are just sounds, devoid of the meaning he once gave them.

He just got here, and he wants to leave, thinking about what he has to do.

There’s a sinuous wave that runs through the crowd as a few people dance and their motion spills out, so eventually to move he has to sort of shimmy his way through, dance himself between conversations and other people’s significant moments.

He manages to make his way to the roof, trying to get away from his thoughts, the party just a little bit too much. He needs to regroup and find his bearings before he can even think about his mission, but when he gets there he finds Finn, breath fogging in the cold, eyes closed and arms open in silent meditation. 

“I can’t get over how lucky I am,” Finn says, opening his eyes when Poe gently rests his hand on his shoulder, and Poe wants to kiss him so badly, the way his big eyes look so sincere in the moonlight, and then there’s a crash, and a tumble of the party coming up out of the skylight to join them in the cold.

The moment they’re all out here for is the crossing of the moons. It happens every night, but the pilots, always a superstitious lot, declared it to be a daily portent that had to be physically observed in order to bestow another day’s luck.

“What are you supposed to do?” Finn asks, quiet and secret, into Poe’s ear.

“When the moons line up perfectly, you make a wish,” Poe replies, as the moons start to overlap. “If you time it exactly right, the wish will come true. At least, that’s what Jess tells everyone,” he demurs. 

When the cheer goes ‘round, Finn’s eyes close, his lips twitching with a whispered wish, and Poe knows this because he misses the moons entirely, focused only on Finn’s face. 

When they come back in, flushed from the temperature change and reawakened by the bracing cold, the party changes from a conventional social gathering into something darker, more desperate. The music changes to have a deeper beat, fast like a thready heartbeat, and the walls hum and resonate with the hidden frequencies locked away from human hearing. Some people go to sleep, waving as they climb up, others leave to rut and suck and find validation in the touch of another, but nearly everyone else is dancing with that single-minded focus that comes after the moons cross and the day begins anew. 

Poe isn’t in the mood to dance, and so ends up nursing a bottle of ale in an alcove just watching the party, and from the outside he looks content, buzzed on the brew in his hands, but it’s a lie, he is watching everywhere but where Finn is, his mind racing with possibilities. 

He has orders. He has tried to think of a way out of them for the last several days. He’s written resignation letters under his breath in the shower. He’s argued the ethics of treating Finn as an enemy when they are no longer in active wartime. He wants to tell people, wants to spread nasty, vicious rumours - the General pimped him out, she seduced him, she left him for dead so as not to deal with having used him. Even if the truth lies somewhere between those facts, it eats him up inside knowing that this is, comparatively, not a big deal. He could ask Finn for everything Leia wants, and he would give it to him. Finn is heart and soul dedicated to his adopted cause, but there is the fact at the heart of it that Leia is right that he is easily spooked. Poe thinks that he deserves that though, he deserves a life free of danger, free of the horrors of war and an inevitable violent, pointless death. He should be given everything to allow for that perfect, earned life - money, a ship, a scholarship to some ivory tower institution where he can be reborn into a higher calling and protected behind a force field. Instead though, they want him right here, right in the heart of a war that will never end, bound to Poe, and all because Poe is good at getting people to do what Leia wants, good at getting his hands dirty.

There’s a part of him that rebels though, that says that his hands could never be dirty if they’re touching Finn, no matter the reason.

There’s this dreamy quality to the air, a combination of the filmy, oily feeling of being awake the hour before sunrise when you were tired twelve hours ago, the warm coral lights that are seeded in each of the corners, and whatever Jessika has put in her smoke machine, the one he officially doesn’t know she has, that pumps out this delicately-fragranced smoke that makes everything just a little bit slower, a bit softer, in a different way to their usual intoxicants. This mixture makes it easy to be a bit out of his body, and just the tiniest push causes him to finally just do it, just walk up to Finn and lace their fingers together, deliberately brush his whole body against him as he squeezes past and hears Finn’s conversation with one of the mechanics stumble as he is pulled gently away. Poe forces himself to continue walking, feeling Finn shuffle to keep up, their linked hands strong, a guide rope up this doomed mountain, Poe determined and Finn trusting that this is going to be something important.

They climb into the rafters silently, passing half-opened rooms, some with moving shadows and some entirely empty but for the blue light of the pre-dawn, pushing carefully past a pair of support crew girls asleep in one of the hammocks, their hair hanging down like a curtain across the pathway, climbing higher and higher until Poe is pushing open Finn’s door and pulling him inside after him. 

He stands there for a minute, running their fingers together, the silence ready to break, but until then just lacing and unlacing their hands together, fascinated with Finn’s strong fingers, the way their skin looks together.

He raises his head and that moment then is the opening of the curtains, the beginning of the performance, and he bites his lip, lets himself look desperate and flayed open with desire, and that’s the moment when Finn becomes his. Poe hesitates, playing that he is unsure, still playing this game, giving Finn an out, but Finn takes a step closer and then they are breathing each other’s breath for a long moment, before Poe slides his nose down the strong bridge of Finn’s and kisses him to breathlessness. 

The room is small and the bed is unmade, the blankets still neatly folded on top of it, but Poe can’t wait, can’t break the moment, can’t introduce awkward laughter to what is deathly serious. Poe doesn’t want to be on his knees for this, he wants to feel it as a whole body experience, wants to feel the give of the mattress beneath the movement of Finn’s body on top of his, wants to make everything just so good for him, and selfishly make it good for himself, not the greater good, but the localised good of his own skin, his own desire, until the roaring tide within him it is satisfied.

“Did you ever?” Poe whispers against Finn’s lips as his hands touch his face, his hair, his neck, because he has to know, has to.

Finn shakes his head, pulling back, eyes wide. “But I’ve thought about it a lot,” he says, as if that is the same. As if it can ever be the same to think it.

Poe kisses him again, and slowly undresses him. Finn is fractious beneath his touch, undoing clasps and buttons with excited hands, a few steps ahead, shrugging his shoulders until his hands run away with him, and Poe has to hold them, calm him down, kiss all the worry and excitement down into pure lust, transmuted anticipation, rob him of all his clean, healthy anxiety about this, let him know it is safe to want, that there is care here, that there is no way this won’t be incredible.

He removes his own clothes, lets Finn help a bit, pop the button on his trousers and ruck up his shirt to drag nimble fingers over his abdominals, but does the rest of his undressing quickly, then pulls Finn down with him onto the mattress. The quilted top is rough, not designed for bare skin, but part of Poe loves it, wants to feel every texture, commit it to memory, so every time he makes his bed he thinks purely of the act, not the circumstances around it.

“Get on top of me,” he says, and lets himself have this. Finn is deliciously heavy from the work of the physical therapy droids, the muscles of his back carefully rebuilt to be as strong as, if not stronger than before.

“I want you to fuck me,” Poe says, between kisses, and feels Finn quiver in anticipation as he continues, “I really want this for you, you’re so beautiful, I really want you to love it here with us, love it in this room, want you to remember this when you’re here alone, remember how sweet it is, how goddamn sweet I’m going to make it for you.” It’s a compulsive litany, half truths and half secrets, he cannot stop himself, the filth that comes out of his mouth is automatic, from some deep part of his mind that just can’t shut up. It is best that he always did this with his mouth full before, or he could have given the whole game away.

There’s a pot of slick in the pocket of his jacket that is still warm from his body, and the surface of it glistens in the low light of the breaking dawn when Finn cracks the lid delicately between his thick fingers, and if there’s a point the spell might break it would be now, when the failings of the male body come to the forefront. How much more seamless it would be for Finn to just slide in, that Poe’s body would naturally know how to respond to how much his mind needs this, that his arousal would not need this artificial help to do this.

He does his best though, talks him through it. Moans as punctuation, laughs when everything is right, pants for emphasis, and it really is no hardship because it really is that good, Finn really has thought about this in useful detail.

Poe always likes it on his back because of the closeness, because it feels like he himself is getting fucked, rather than that someone is fucking a part of him. It brings his dick into it, rather than it getting cold until someone jerks him off. He’s got off on it before, but he doesn’t want that for this time, wants to be bent in half, wants to wrap his ankles around Finn’s strong neck and feel the stretch and burn of every muscle, tendon and sinew in his body, wants to feel it for days.

Finn is looking fascinated at the vision of his fingers disappearing inside Poe, watching his every response, checking he’s okay, watching how every time he presses his callused fingertips against that certain place inside him that it makes Poe’s dick jump, honest to god jerk itself from how good it is. 

“It’s amazing, you’re amazing,” Finn murmurs, bent over so as to kiss him while his fingers plunge wetly and rapidly all the way up to the third joint, a precursor to fucking, already so good, the boy is a natural, he will be the death of Poe. 

“You too buddy. You ready to get inside me?”

“I want to do this first,” he says, and slides down until he has his mouth hovering just over the tip of Poe’s dick, his breath so wet and humid and his eyes looking pleased and ravenous.

Poe can’t allow this, the panic beneath everything screams. He wants it so badly, but that’s not what he wants for Finn, however much he knows that no one is asking him to do it, he wants to, but there’s this twist in his gut when Finn looks up at him and smiles, the way Poe always made sure to do when there was far less on the line.

“Oh god, buddy, no, I’ll come if you do that,” he lies. “Just get inside me, I want to come when you’re fucking me, I’m so close please please-,” whining like he’s being tortured, making it good, making his desperation believable.

Finn laughs, short and sharp. “Okay!” he says, so happy. “But next time, I’m gonna,” and then he is pushing in, and Poe brings his legs up until Finn grabs them and hooks them over his arms, and then Poe is getting fucked, and it is absolutely perfect. He braces himself on the crooked wall and takes Finn’s pace, feeds it back to him, lets his hips move and feels it everywhere, in the straining tendons of his arms, in his core, feels it bright and strange in the tip of his cock, the stimulation simultaneously hot and cold and sharp and pleasurable, his synapses firing just whatever they feel like, happily confused at the overdose of pleasurable inputs. 

The party is far away and apart from the occasional creak of people climbing up to their rooms there is nothing but the sharp sounds of their slick skin slapping, thighs on thighs, pelvis to ass, Poe’s grunts of exertion and the thready whine of Finn as he tries to keep it together. It is so good, there is such benefit to fucking someone who is fit and strong and desperate to please, because Poe is absolutely sure that while he won’t be able to walk for a few hours, he’ll carry this around for a long time.

Poe’s heart is in his mouth and part of him wants to die here, right now, pretend that what happens next isn’t going to happen, that this frantic fuck is all he actually wants, not to speak of forever without ash in his mouth, but he is so alight with pleasure that he cannot withstand it. His orgasm builds in his pelvis and it is just so good, and he sobs his pleasure against Finn’s mouth as he bends over, the pressure of Finn’s flat stomach as it brushes against his dick enough to make him come so hard he fears he might never stop. Finn’s orgasm is startled out of him, unsurprisingly, by the sheer force of the grip Poe’s ass has on him, and he gasps, wide eyed and wonderful.

Finn is snuggled on his chest in the afterglow, his dick only just pulled out, his stomach painted with Poe’s semen, and Poe feels flayed open, oddly cold, and still feverish and prickly with arousal even after he’s come. They’re both wrecked with bodily fluids, there is the tender soreness of fingertip bruises forming on his thighs, and despite the fact he’s never marked black and blue for anything less than a x-wing crash or a knock-down bar fight, he knows he’ll feel them for days.

He wants to rouse Finn, pull him into the weird deep bath, and hold him in warm water, let them both be reborn anew, or at least be clean, and maybe let himself believe that he is repeating all the mistakes Leia made getting close to someone the moment the war ends rather than just doing what she asks, but instead he takes a deep breath and says, “Thanks buddy, that was incredible!”

Finn smiles a sleepy smile, and rolls off him. He’s sated, poor thing, wrung completely out. Poe kisses his cheek, and winces to himself as he climbs out of the bed.

“W’re you goin’?” Finn says quietly, barely concious.

“There’s not enough room for both of us, buddy. Gonna go to my own bunk, but I’ll see you in the morning, okay? Sleep well in your new bed.”

It’ll be easier this way, Poe thinks as he climbs gingerly down the stairs to his quarters. For me and for him.

He usually sleeps well after sex, but this time he lies awake until the communicator bird starts its morning teleconference with the rising sun. 

He goes to the gymnasium after a couple of fractious hours of sleep and throws himself into his old exercise routine from back when he was at the academy and probably twice as fit as he is now. He doesn’t stop until every muscle hurts as much as the rest of him and his hangover has been thoroughly sweated out through every pore.

Finn comes into the gym just as Poe is finishing up, and they nod to each other, Finn stretches for a long time, the First Order being very into flexibility, which seems perverse when the stormtrooper armour was so rigid, while Poe finishes his final circuit. Finn watches him in the cascade of mirrors, thinking Poe can’t see the way he watches how his ass moves on the treadmill, the way his eyes follow the drops of sweat that drip off his brow, 

When Finn steps up to take the treadmill next to him, Poe hits stop, smiles, wipes his soaking hair with a towel, and goes to drown himself in the shower.

* * *

Even if he was back in Kylo Ren’s chair, Poe would insist that he meant to finish the mission Leia gave him. Yes, he didn’t interrogate Finn via pillowtalk, but in his defence, Finn was asleep almost immediately after he spent himself into Poe’s guts. Anyway, the mission was to make Finn dependent on him, to keep him on base, keep him loyal and sweet and devoted, so that when the opportunity arises, he doesn’t try and leave.

Still, Poe has multiple opportunities to ask Finn any number of things, because Finn is his shadow that whole day. They have a long conversation about nothing over lunch, and Poe wants to ask about things he knows Finn would be eager to share with him, the structure of his unit, the weaknesses of his commander, the place that the Finalizer went for refuelling. Things they know, that Finn has given willingly in his debriefings, but that Poe wants to check, to see if Finn maybe isn’t as valuable as Leia thinks.

Instead they talk about everything else, and nothing, and it is bad that Poe is the one who feels he is relaxing, giving up secrets he never meant to share. This has to stop. This is dangerous in a way he’s never felt before. He doesn’t want a relationship on these terms, however easy it would be to just give himself to Finn, never let go. 

“So,” Finn says, “I was thinking you could maybe show me your rooms tonight?” He swallows around the terrible line, “I’d really like to see your bedroom ceiling.”

Poe must be far gone, must be utterly ruined to find that charming, to want to take Finn up on it and pound him underneath his open skylight, but instead he does the honorable thing. 

“Buddy”, he says, heart in his mouth. “You’re great, you’re amazing, but last night...it was just sex. Just once. It was all it can be. I’m sorry.”

Finn nods, and Poe waits for the crash, for the telltale sign of a break of trust. “Okay! I understand. I mean, I’m disappointed, but it was really good, Poe. Thank you. If you ever want to do it again, I’d be glad to. Really. I know you’re busy with being a General, which is really cool! You probably don’t have time for a relationship. Maybe when General Organa gets back we can talk again? But if not that’s fine too!” 

Finn gets up, pauses, and then ducks down again and kisses his cheek, warm and dry, pats him on the shoulder, and takes his tray back to the galley for seconds. He seems...genuinely fine. Poe wants to grab him and shout “No! you don’t get it! We’re supposed to be together! This is our chance! You’re my redemption! This is killing me! One day someone will write a holoseries about how tragic this is!” but instead he drops his empty tray and goes to his office.

He stares into space for a while, and then pulls his holopad from the wall so hard the cord snaps. He flicks across to Leia’s message, now flashing with an overdue reminder and pauses just long enough to take a long swallow of cool, clean water, and flicks his message into the screen.

“It is done. He won’t leave, and he’ll do anything you ask of him. But this is it. I won’t do your dirty work anymore.”

There’s a reply almost instantly. “Understood.”

It doesn’t make him feel any better.


	4. Eyes wide to an unfamiliar sky

Poe throws himself into his work, partly because he needs to be busy, and also because it is the easiest way to keep up the fiction that he completed his mission without giving Finn mixed signals. Both of these turn out to be easy, as Operations is absolutely the worst division to be responsible for. In the aftermath of the destruction of the Hosnian system their supply chains were shattered, and it’s a relief to have an excuse to go out into space and do some actual work, tracking down their scattered suppliers and finding new ones to replace those that died in the attacks. It’s honest work, involving a lot of negotiation in bars and scummy space stations, and handing out actual money instead of the proxy of sexual favours. Poe barely has time to feel disappointed he didn’t get put in charge of the fleet, he’s so busy taking endless inventories and listening to holocalls ring out into nothingness.

He also feels personally invested in getting them restocked because of just how terrifyingly well armed and provisioned the First Order are. That first moment when he was taken onto the Finalizer made the pit drop out of his stomach, because it was the first time he realised that they weren’t comparable forces duking it out, they were tiny, scrappy idealists flying X-Wings held together with good intentions, while the Finalizer was like looking at a holo from the glory days of the Empire writ large. Nothing in Poe Dameron’s life had ever gleamed like the floors of their hangar. Their _hangar_. 

Being Acting-General means he gets a share of the base resources, which means he shouldn’t have to fly these missions himself. He meets with Snap, who is coordinating the hundreds of new volunteers who all want to be X-Wing pilots, unhindered in their enthusiasm by their inability to actually fly anything. Snap says he can give him someone, but the rota looks so bare, with no relief pilots rostered and huge gaps where their senior pilots used to be, that Poe demurs. He wants to be out there anyway, feels stifled by the base and the ghosts that live within it. He also wants to give Finn a chance - a chance to grow away from him, to hopefully run, and to give himself some plausible deniability when Finn does.

It’s not a good sign though, when before his first mission Finn comes to him and asks him if they’re still friends. 

He’s never seen Finn like this. He looks tired, which is fair, it’s all hands on deck these days, and Finn is cross-training with about five different departments to fill in the gaps of his stormtrooper training (heavy on the marching, light on mechanics) while also doing the various bits of necessary scut work that show up on his docket. However, today there’s also something else, an edge, a sharpness to him that Poe has never seen. Like he is splintering under the reality of this apparent post-war period.

Finn shuts the door, and braces himself against it.

“I don’t like that you’re avoiding me,” Finn says, a little cracked at the edges.

Poe stands from where he was bent over his desk, scrawling documents, shocked.

“You don’t talk to me anymore. I understand that you’re busy, I’m busy too, but you don’t reply to my messages, you don’t even bother to try and sit next to me in the mess. At the party last week you did a singular circuit, said “hey, it’s nice to see you buddy, we need to catch up!” and then left when I was in the fresher.

Poe wants to play dumb, but he’s tired too, and frustrated. “Why are you still here?” he asks. “I’m sorry, I know I’m being blunt, but I can get you out of here. I’ve got credits, contacts, everything you need. Come with me tomorrow and you can slip away.”

Finn shakes his head during this, his hands up. “No, no, I don’t want that. I don’t want to just leave, after all you’ve done for me-”

“Finn, you don’t owe us anything.” Poe says, somehow pleading.

At that, Finn smiles. “I know. I know. I just...I want to destroy the order.” he is so vehement, his eyes sharp and fierce when he says destroy. “I want them all dead. When I leave, I want it to be as a free man, not a fugitive, not a coward. So you’re stuck with me. You okay with that?” There’s a challenge there, as if he really does expect Poe to object, all fight in his constants and defiance in his vowels.

Poe buckles underneath it, puts down the pen where it’s digging into his hand, painting his palms blue. “Oh god, buddy, of course I am? I’m sorry about everything, sorry for being an asshole and avoiding you, I want nothing more than to be friends with you” he lies. 

Finn visibly relaxes, and they talk for a little longer, just about rotations and what Poe is going to go and try and find on his mission tomorrow. They promise to stay in touch. Poe gives Finn his private cryptokey, tells him to use it for everything, high priority, but even then, this whole conversation feels, just a little, like it might be goodbye. There’s a moment, right when Finn leaves, that the air gets thick around them with the yearning kind of sexual tension, and instead Poe forces himself to clasp Finn’s shoulder, his deltoid warm and solid beneath the worn fabric of a fourth-hand shirt that belonged to someone now-dead.

When he flies out the next morning, Finn is there, holding his gaze across the hangar as he sweeps up under the tuition of one of the least patient droids. He isn’t listening, just watching Black One, watching the mirror that allows Poe to look in his blind spots, and their eyes meet. Poe nods, and Finn returns it, and then Poe flies away, the tower chattering in his ear for a long moment until even that fades, and there is only the sound of the stars.

It should have ended there. They should have taken something from that exchange, let it break down the romantic ideals they held about each other, exchanged those friendship promises, and then both moved on. They’re tied together enough in the narrative of this war that they’ll always be thought of together, so all of this doesn’t matter. In fact, he’d told people, people he can trust, to make Finn forget him, to put as much temptation in his way, plausibly, obviously, but just to get him into a new life cleanly, whatever that new life looks like. He keeps the credits in a separate account, just in case Finn asks for them. Poe’s stuck in the Resistance, he doesn’t need them. He probably won’t even need a new jacket for another ten years.

It didn’t end. Each time, over the next few months he got within communications range of a Resistance relay, his cryptokey downloaded a stream of messages from Finn, all of which fill his heart with bright, sweet, emotion, but also unlocked that well desperation and frustration at the fact that these messages mean he hasn’t run. Finn is taking this friendship promise seriously, and despite all of his misgivings, the amount of time Poe spends in cantinas sending messages back is really undercutting his aims of a slow fade.

* * *

He’s on Tegana, a moderately uninteresting world on the edge of Order space, buying drinks in order to track down a rumoured a new source for malonic acid. Said source had yet to show themselves, and Poe is almost ready to give up when he notices a tired looking young man in black leather who you might describe as looking like the most tired person in the galaxy, if that title hadn’t already been claimed by Poe himself. (He assumes anyway, he hasn’t looked in a mirror willingly for several months). It’s popular among the edgier youths of the galaxy to dress in the way the First Order presents itself in its shockingly popular holoprograms, all sleek lines and powerful iconography, but this young man wears it differently. He has hair like fire, cheekbones stronger for his obviously uncharacteristic gauntness, and he looks at Poe long and slow over the bar, and in those eyes, Poe can see his future stretching out ahead of him. He’s seen this man before, as a character in briefing notes and propaganda both. He knows what he’s done. He could walk over there right now, play stupid, dumb and drunk, buy this traitor a drink and touch his thigh, get him alone in a back room and snap his slender neck, restart the war with the twist of vulnerable vertebrae. Or, he could lift his trusty, still very illegal mini-blaster and shoot across the bar, and get himself killed a split second later, but if his aim was good it could be worth it, it could work. Maybe all that has happened in the last few years was training for the day he saw General Hux across a bar, caught his eye, and took the fate of the galaxy into his own hands.

Instead, he thinks of Finn, thinks of his anger, how they want to cut the head off the monster, cut its heart right out, not just cut it between the fingers and hope it bleeds to death. There are an unknown quantity of men like Hux lurking in the shadows, and all intelligence says that he has been sidelined after the failure of Starkiller. It would be a waste, a meaningless waste by someone who should know better than to go off half-cocked, playing hero.

Instead, he turns away from the beckoning of the alternate history, he buys a drink instead for the obviously bored business traveller to his right who has been watching him all night with obviously lusty eyes. He makes small talk with lips stretched tight against his teeth, hands shaking in fists against his thighs. She turns out to have a lead on where he can get a few things on his list, and when later he holds her against the wall and buries his mouth in the sweet warmth of her cunt, it is because he wants to, because he is glad to be alive, a vainglorious deathwish again not anywhere near as good in reality as fantasy. Hux had left the bar half an hour earlier, and with him went half of the seemingly innocuous patrons, and Poe is so goddamn glad to be alive he gives Lavia a really extremely good deal and a promise of dinner and dancing next time he’s in the system. 

He’s Lavia’s on again, off again boyfriend for a few months until she gets bored of his romantic dreamboat act and instead just messages him her entire address book and an invitation to never contact her again. She’s a logistical loss to them - she has been a buyer for some of the largest high-end traders for most of her career, but he is relieved to no longer have to lie to her as to why he needs to know all the suppliers of Rhydonium in the galaxy. 

The main supplier of Rhydonium is a self-proclaimed goddess who controls a small planet that is so chock-full of raw materials that the first time he visits he trips over a large lump of gold just lying there on the rough ground. The goddess wants nothing whatsoever to do with any of their galactopolitical meanderings, and she cares not for the Resistance, the Republic, or the First Order. She doesn’t even want Poe, or any of the other strategically pretty people he brings on missions with him. It’s infuriating, but he knew this going in. The Republic have known about the Goddess (if she has any other name, he hasn’t been able to find it out) and her garden of plenty for long before even the Empire rose, and as far as Poe knows she really is an ancient god of rocket fuel and copper piping, and he respects that. It is a strange galaxy, and he isn’t one to pretend that weird shit doesn’t happen.

The Goddess has a harem of interesting people that she has acquired through various avenues. It’s less a sex harem than one of useful skills, although they certainly fuck more than the scientists, botanists and engineers he has known. He finds out from them exactly where they were picked up from, and manages to get himself looking prime for harvesting by the slavers on Talessia Prime during the Carnival, looking just high enough in borrowed Republic mechanic gear, a much-desired piece of specialist equipment strapped to his thigh, and spends a week at the slave market making the right kind of friends and trying to keep a low profile until his plan can come to fruition.

His plan pays off, though he worries about what he’d have done if it hadn’t, and the emissary from the Goddess buys him and brings him back to her. She stares at him unblinking for a long moment, and then signals to install him in her harem with a flick of her wrist. 

The people in the harem spend their days high on this substance that’s delivered in something like the salt licks he remembers from the bantha farms back home. Poe avoids them for the first few days, focuses on lounging around making conversation with the hilarious stoned ex-specialists, mostly grossed out by the communal licking more than anything. He doesn’t really get it, not for a few days, not until the first time the Goddess fucks him. It is exhausting to the point of unpleasance, and when he is released back into the harem he feels like a husk, all happiness and bodily fluids removed from him. The other specialists stroke him, pet him, lead him to the bantha-lick and encourage him to taste. He does, too out of it to resist, and it completes him, whatever it is, bursts salt-sweet with electrolytes and simple sugars across his tongue as they coo at him, talk about how to keep up your strength, pour cold water down his throat in between ravenous licks.

The next times are better, and it feels a bit like the old days, a little stoned, a little hurting, but still good.

The fourth time he goes to the goddess’ quarters though, she has a holopad out, and she gestures for him to make a deal.

“You belong to another,” the Goddess says in her deep gravelly voice that echoes with the fires of hell. “I appreciate the lengths you’ve gone to to get my attention, young Poe, and you are a sweet morsel, but I am not in the business of eating pretty things for the sake of them. I had thought that you were sincere in your submission to me,” she silences him as he goes to protest. “No, do not. I do believe you thought you were sincere, but there is more to submission than intent. Unlike my other favourites, while I can use you,” and she licks her lips then, looking at his feet with relish, “the fact is you have another to whom you are bound.” She gestures him to put his hand out, and sucks his finger into her mouth. “Two others. There is no spare thread of loyalty in your mind, and so I will let you go.” 

She gives them a deal that is unfailingly generous, carved onto a chit that is made of some kind of bone, a thread of sinew still hanging from it. When he gives it to her emissary, he shows Poe to a warehouse that contains so much raw fighter fuel the sight makes him weak at the knees.

They lend him a freighter, and when he requests landing clearance at D’Qar, they have to move all the X-Wings to a secondary hangar in order to get it anywhere near the cargo houses. 

There’s also the little question of him having been gone for six weeks with no contact, and that they’d been about to declare him dead. Another few days, Statura yells, and they were going to send Finn to Yavin to tell Kes everything about his stupid, heroic son.

He gets put on forced leave, and wanders around the base for a few hours in a daze, still half-high from the bantha-lick, but reluctant to go to sickbay and have it taken care. Finn is nowhere to be seen, but everyone says he’s just out on maneuvers high in the mountains, that he’s doing well. Poe debates climbing up and breaking into Finn’s room, just camping out there, sleeping on sheets that must smell of him, really giving into his horrible, stupid impulses that are only showing up because he’s spiralling down from his high.

When he crashes, it is terrible, horrible, like he doesn’t fit in his skin anymore. He itches and aches, wants to run until his skeleton rips through his body, escapes from its prison. He goes to the hangar, loiters around until it gets quiet, jumps back in his cargo ship and runs straight into a barfight to calm his nerves. 

He comes back a week later on a gurney, a fistful of intercepted transmissions in the lining of his jacket, blood singing with the best intoxicants money can buy (but not good, not good enough), and Kalonia takes one look at him and forcibly sedates him for a week.

Finn is there when he wakes up. He has a uniform now, he’s made lieutenant, the stripes standing out against the drab olive of the ground uniform. He’s murmuring something, holding Poe’s hand lightly in his own so as not to disrupt the drip they’ve plumbed into him. 

Poe goes to speak, but what comes out is a horrible crunch and scratch. He doesn’t yearn for the bantha-lick, but underneath the lingering sedation and the painkillers is a wrong feeling all the same, a soreness in the very concept of his voice, and then the memory hits him - remembers the second punch after the first one knocked his head up, straight into the throat, and how he went down after that, no breath at all. 

At the horrible noise, Finn’s head whips up. His eyes are wet, and Poe panics, and just as Finn is going to say something, the med droids rush in, alerted by the spike in his heart rate. They shove Finn out the way, and he staggers a bit at the force they have to use to do so, and it’s because Poe is the one holding tight enough that his own knuckles are bloodless-white. 

“I’ll speak to you later,” Finn says, and walks off stiffly.

They don’t speak later. In fact, Poe isn’t allowed to speak for a while. His voice box is fucked, and if he had time for hobbies, his singing career would definitely be over. Kalonia is very angry with him, but there’s a specialist surgery droid on its way from Coruscant, and so he will definitely be able to talk eventually. Until then, there’s a block in place so he can’t do more damage.

“This doesn’t just happen, Poe,” she says, when he tries to explain. “This is deliberate damage, not just from a normal fight. You could have easily bled out, or worse, suffocated in your own trachea.”

Over the next few days he’s visited by a procession of people who come to dress him down. They give him a board and a pen after his holo is confiscated because he insisted on doing work, but his fingers are stiff and useless from where someone stood on them, and so he can only make ineffectual gestures, a tick or a cross for yes or no. There’s talk of demoting him back down to Commander, which God, he wants, but his tick goes ignored. Statura sits in the chair by his bed, ignoring his scribbled protestations, instead keeps rambling on, talking of calling Leia back to deal with him, but it’s an idle threat if Poe’s ever heard one. No one on base has heard from her in weeks, but she keeps appearing in the press, giving long speeches about the necessity of rebuilding a war machine. Statura talks about everything on the books, all the varied options that they give him for discipline, but in the end Poe is merely grounded for a week, which is useless as he won’t be out of the medbay for ten days. 

Turns out he brought back good intel, something he knew the moment BB-8 cocked his head on intercepting it. The cryptography team is better, but they still take too much time to decode anything within its window of usefulness. The transmissions Poe bought back are worrying, the chatter between the lines of code familiar to those who know troop movements like their favourite songs. The First Order has moved, moved weeks ago to some place they use an euphamism for, but the implication is clear as day. Mobilisation. They could be anywhere, could have an army of impossible size at this point, and when Poe sleeps that night he dreams of Star Destroyers swirling around them like a malevolent arm of a galaxy, daring them to make the first move. 

The ceasefire is dying, but thanks to Poe, they have the supplies they need. They just need to find somewhere to go.

* * *

Even after his finger heal, Poe still struggles with in person conversations. People come and sit by him in the pilots’ ready room or the mess and talk at him as he nods or shakes his head, but he misses the act of conversation, its ebb and flow. Instead, he spends hours on his holopad, chatting away to whoever makes the mistake of setting themselves to available.

He misses Finn. A space had finally come up for pilot training and so he was off, spending all the hours of the day either in the simulator or the air. Poe saw him occasionally, really pretty often for how busy he is, because Finn would come by to study wherever Poe is currently holding court, and they’d sit together in companionable silence. Poe wanted so much to be able to speak up, even if just to drill Finn on the components of an engine or the sequence of initialising the hyperdrive, do his part. 

When Kalonia removes the block on his larynx, it is like breathing a full breath again for the first time. The surgery had been moderately successful, something that Kalonia drilled into him was not to be taken lightly. 

“If it was possible for a droid to be scandalised,” she scolded, “That poor surgeon nearly rebooted when it saw what you had done to your poor throat.”

His post-operative instructions from the Doctor included: no singing, no shouting, no hot drinks, no oral sex (giving, Poe, you can receive as much as you like) and as little talking as possible. His post-operative assignments, however, were to report to the hangar to get new orders. 

Kalonia is furious when he tells her. “They talk about how we’re a skeleton crew, but where is the Republic? Where is General Organa? It has been nearly a year, Poe, and we have had no word from her, no supplies, no new fighters, not even an update letter! The only reason we got that surgical droid for you was because my wife knows someone at the supplier who owed her a favour. And now they’re sending you straight back out there, to shout over those broken engines and drown yourself in extra-strength caf no doubt.”

She’s crying with frustration, and bats his hands away when he tries to comfort her, pulling a handkerchief out of her pocket to dab at her eyes. “Oh no, Poe, I’m just tired, a tired old woman who has seen enough war. Go, go be brave.” She gives him a watery smile, and shoos him away. 

* * *

Poe spends the next few weeks in the little office attached to the hangar, putting together mission schedules and support rotas and, more often than not, refilling the caf pot for the mechanics, careful to only drink the lukewarm dregs they leave. The admin droid was long dismantled for parts for the astromechs. BB-8 himself has a panel taken from it. It’s just another casualty of war, but for some reason Poe misses it as much as he misses his missing comrades.

The search for a new place to move the base is becoming increasingly desperate. D’Qar is compromised, but they can’t move just anywhere. They have no idea where the Order is gathering, and for each potential planet found there is always something that disqualifies it - a vulnerable moon, too close to the home planet of a known general, suspicious activity near the poles. The list put together sometime while Poe was losing himself getting supplies is getting shorter and shorter without any breakthroughs. The ceasefire is now nearly a year old and while it feels like the Resistance has finally managed to catch its breath, they are a guerilla force. Full storehouses and new pilots only mean so much if they can’t be kept safe, and safe means hidden.

Poe has access to the list of potential D’Qar replacement planets and is in charge of rostering them into the existing structure in a way that doesn’t let any surveillance know that they are looking. It’s a careful balancing act, and a lot of Poe’s plans involve scanning the holonet for any interest in those areas that they can hide behind. 

The more remote areas of the Daphari system were always near the bottom of the list, mostly because the only thing anyone knew about them was that they were hideously boring, a group of rocks with minor geological interest but not much else. Searching for anything about the system brings up nothing but excited geologist gossip fora and a few mildly entertaining academic flamewars between geologists, archaeologists and anthropologists - these planets have never entertained life, but they have some really exciting rocks if you’re into that kind of thing.

Finn passes his flight test with flying colours, but still has to be supervised for his first ten missions before he’s allowed to fly solo. 

He’s not sure why he volunteers to supervise Finn’s first solo lightspeed mission, but he chooses Daphari because the odds of it being suitable are so low. Most of the galaxy that is habitable has, at some point in history, been colonised, even for a bit. It’s the perfect place for a first mission.

Poe likes to think that time has made his and Finn’s sexual tension and his own pathetic romance-holo yearnings mellow into an annoyance rather than the all- consuming passion they once were, something he doesn’t share with anyone because he suspects that they would laugh. It is more like testing the gap left by a missing tooth with his tongue, tentative touches that will either bring about hideous pain or sweet relief.

Finn is openly excited about everything - flying his first real mission, flying front on the training X-Wing, and flying with Poe. He looks wonderful in his orange jumpsuit, so good that Poe doesn’t even have to insist on someone snapping a holo of the two of them posing in front of their ship, arms slung casually around shoulders, comrades in each other’s arms.

* * *

It should be a straightforward, routine flight. Jump to Daphari, scan the place for the mythical perfect hiding place, jump home in time for evening meal.

Naturally though, their routine mission to scope out the most innocuous system in the galaxy turns into a close encounter with an enormous First Order fleet. Precisely the kind of fleet that the First Order swore they decommissioned, the exact fleet that there is ample evidence of being scuppered off the third moon of Dronf. So either that was careful holoshop, or they actually had two enormous, pants-shittingly terrifying fleets at their disposal. Neither is really comfortable to think about. 

Turns out both great and evil minds think alike though, as both have chosen this system for their secret remobilisation. The history books will no doubt laugh about this.

The dual-ended training X-Wing that they’re flying in does allow for secondary pilot to take over, but Poe waits to see what Finn does, whether he gets spooked.

Finn doesn’t, but he does go quiet, his breathing heavy and echoing around the cockpit.

“Have they seen us?” Poe says gently, his thumb hovering over the manual override button on the secondary joystick.

“They haven’t scrambled fighters as far as I can tell,” Finn replies, quickly clicking through the flight computer. They haven’t brought a droid this time, and so calculations are limited. “But they can’t have not seen us.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Poe replies. “They aren’t expecting us. There’s no guarantee that this fleet is battle-ready. They may just be hiding here with a skeleton crew. Let’s assume that the ceasefire holds, and look at what we were sent here to do,” Poe reasons, as much with himself as with Finn.

They spend nearly a whole tense hour scanning the outer planets in the system. With each sweep it becomes more and more obvious they have stumbled across more than just a graveyard.

“I can’t believe they’ve been letting us just fly around,” Finn marvels, as they sweep past another enormous battery of guns, weapons and swathes of tiny pinpricks of white that show an entire army of Stormtroopers on maneuvers.

Poe can’t believe it either. His heart rate is low, according to the computer, but the tension in his chest is so high he feels like he might burst. He wants to panic, but maybe there was something in all that officer and diplomatic training, because instead he just says, “I bet they’re in a huge meeting right now trying to work out what to do about us. If they shoot us down they start the war off again, which ruins the surprise. If they let us go, they lose the element of surprise because we’ll go home and tell them. If they capture us, we will try and escape, and we have always been pretty good at doing that.”

“So we’re fucked,” says Finn, cutting through the bullshit with his usual perceptive flair. “The end of peace. It was nice while it lasted.”

Poe smiles to himself, sad and weary, and then, “Yeah buddy, but there’s no one I would rather be fucked with than you right now,” falls out of his mouth before he can even think about it. Before Finn can reply and really bring the awkward deathbed confession out into the open, it becomes obvious that the First Order has finished their meeting, as an entire squadron of TIE Fighters descends from the belly of the nearest Star Destroyer.

Poe hits the manual override and takes control, as Finn yells, not realising that he’d be overruled.

“I got this buddy, let me drive. You take guns, okay, you’re a better shot than me.”

“Just like the first time?” Finn says, laughing.

“Just like the first time,” Poe echoes, the adrenaline making him feel like his old self again. 

They have the benefit of speed and distance, but they are severely outnumbered. All they have to do is survive this dogfight long enough to get the light speed engine warmed up, something Poe had forgotten to tell Finn to keep ready so they could jump at any time.

They tear off across open space, doing absolutely everything to not to engage as Poe throws himself ‘round the cockpit in defensive maneuvers, all the time muttering ‘come on, come on’ under his breath as he watches the hyperdrive gauge spin up. It is so close, just a few more seconds to go when there’s a great juddering thud of a bolt hitting the starboard lower foil, and the X-Wing spins, which thankfully means they avoid the rest of the lucky volley. When Poe gets control over the ship, it’s listing to one side, but Finn has blown the lucky TIE right out of the sky. The disabling shot was nothing more than pure dumb luck, nothing that they could do in the frictionless expanse of space to stop it, but there’s no way they can jump this X-Wing back home without stabilisers, and so Poe drags his eyes away from the green light of the hyperdrive indicator, and takes a second.

He misses BB-8 at this moment, but he’s a good pilot and always scored well in flight calculus, and so he trusts his gut and the smarter parts of his brain and does what comes naturally, which turns out to be as elegant a loop as he can force out of their doomed craft, and points it at the nearest moon.

“Get ready to eject the moment we hit the atmosphere” he shouts, voice thankfully holding up, praying that there even is atmosphere. The moon looks cold and grey and, even at this distance, is silent on his scopes.

The TIEs are gaining, handsome new stock, the First Order are utter bastards who they shouldn’t have even pretended to trust, but they hit the atmosphere with a good lead and Poe shouts “NOW” the moment the little red ‘habitable outside conditions’ indicator lights up on the dashboard, and then there’s a mechanical crunch and he is soaring into the crisp blue sky, the air so cold it takes his breath away, but his parachute inflates, and in the distance he can see Finn’s also open and Finn’s arm waving frantically. He waves back as they drift down into the unknown. 

It’s a short hike across mostly open, craggy wastes to get to Finn, who is jammed into his ejector seat and obviously trying not to panic. “We have got to stop crashing like this,” Poe says good naturedly as he cuts him free, and when he finally gets his knife through the seam Finn half-falls, half-climbs out into the dusty, arid world.

“What do we do now?” Finn asks. 

Poe shrugs. “The SOP is set up a beacon and wait for rescue, but we’ll need to hack the beacon to add in something so they don’t just send a single rescue craft, or it’s going to get pretty busy down here.”

They scavenge everything from Finn’s ejector seat, including the beacon, and start walking. There’s a set of promising-looking hills nearby they were lucky to have missed, and when they get there there’s a small lake and some solid-looking caves, better than you could hope for as a place to hide. The water is fresh and clean, unlike a memorable time Poe crashed and had to survive on stagnant water for three days. The whole of the lake is clearly visible, sandy-bottomed with small fish darting around, minding their own business. 

The Resistance prides itself on the quality of its survival pack, and having the luxury of two means that they for once have everything they could dream of. There are rations, fire kits, med kits and water purifiers, beacons, basic holopads full of the kind of information you’d want to have behind enemy lines, all wrapped in the Hoth-rated sleeping bags that form the padding of the flight seat. It’s an ingenious design achieved through a long experience of trial and error of pilots getting shot down over hostile territory. 

Poe manages to hack the beacon quickly - it is designed to be editable, so it is the absolute simplest form of hacking, mostly just socially engineering it to spit out its little keyboard to allow him to change the text away from the standard ‘I fucked up come get me’ to something more along the lines of ‘help we’re alive but surrounded send entire fleet we have important assets’, and he’s done.

The problem then is that he’s _done_. They’re secure. There’s a thick copse of very sad and grey trees covering them, while the outside is cold they do have insulated flight suits, plus the water in the lake is surprisingly warm, probably due to thermal vents, and they have enough food for a month even without rationing or fishing.

This is the closest thing to a vacation Poe Dameron has had since he last went home before defecting to the Resistance six years ago, and isn’t that a terrifying thought?

He says that to Finn, partly for something to say.

“Isn’t that a little depressing?” he says.

Finn is already shaking his head. “By that measure this is the first vacation I have ever had. What do you do on vacation?”

They’re stretched out on the sleeping bags, the fire roaring nearby. The sun is setting, just barely above them. Finn has his flightsuit open to the waist, the top tied jauntily around his hips, a short sleeved tshirt stretched across his arms. He’s filled out a lot since leaving medical. He looks like he did that first day Poe saw him on D’Qar, strong and alive and so full of goodness, wearing Poe’s jacket like a memorial stone.

“Depends what you like. Some people go somewhere cold, enjoy snow and mountains. Some people like to go and see the sights. I went to Coruscant with my Dad when I was thirteen, even though my Dad had lived there for most of his life I still insisted on getting a guide book and visiting everything it told me was important. The best vacations though, probably somewhere warm, with a beach, lots of sun, swimming, good food, somewhere just fancy enough that they’ll bring you drinks but leave you alone otherwise, with someone who you genuinely like to spend time with, like a girlfriend or a boyfriend,” he pauses, “Or your best buddy,” he elbows Finn in as jocular a way as he can manage.

“Poe,” Finn says, serious, and when Poe looks over his eyes are wide in wonder. “I think I want to do all of those things.”

Poe can’t help but chuckle, lying back and stretching sedately. “Of course, buddy. When we get out of here, we should try and grab some vacay, before the whole war starts again.”

Finn takes a deep breath, and then he’s moving, rolling over until he is straddling Poe’s hips, his face very close. “Poe,” he says, and it’s the quiet rumble of distant thunder. This is Finn’s sex voice, Poe realises. “We are alone here. The war’s probably already restarted. I would really like to have that conversation again. The one about us.” He kisses Poe’s forehead, then his right temple, the place on his cheek just above the stubble growth, the tip of his nose. It is shockingly erotic and Poe wants so much his heart hurts. “Please,” he whispers, lips brushing against lips. “I know what this means. This could be our last night. We should make the most of it.” He kisses Poe softly on the mouth. “Tell me you don’t want this.”

“I do”, Poe says, quiet. “But I can’t.” 

Finn groans, frustrated, and Poe is shaken by the feeling that he is so young, so naive, he doesn’t understand all of the dimensions sex can take, that it isn’t just about the content of the safe sex holos, all hot bodies and barrier methods and enthusiastic consent. It makes him feel hot and angry, and he grabs Finn’s face before he can even think twice about it.

“Hey, no, no, you don’t understand, I want you so much, you have no idea. But you don’t know anything about me, Finn. You don’t know what I’ve done.” 

He means to leave it oblique, a threat within a statement, but Finn doesn’t seem dissuaded by that, and Poe can feel the bones and muscles in his face as he moves to speak again, and then it all comes spilling out, all the secrets he never told anyone. 

“I go on missions, for the General, that seem like normal missions but they’re not. I go to supervise diplomatic exchanges, but I am the exchange, I’m the payment. I have sex with people so the Resistance can survive, so it can get goods, money, favours, anything it needs that it can’t buy. I thought that I could survive it, I used to be pretty free with my affections, back when I first joined. If she’d asked, maybe I could have done it, but instead I got...manipulated into it. One day I was sucking cock for fun and the next day I’m taking deliveries of data chips and then it’s ‘get on your knees, then you’ll get the data chip.” He’s shaking and he doesn’t want to look at Finn’s face, but he forces himself to, to watch for the disgust and whatever else he’s half-expecting. “I did all this, I gave it all because I believed in the Resistance, I would do anything for the General, anything, I swore fidelity to her when I joined, not to the Resistance but to her personally, and I thought I was doing good, but then the ceasefire happened anyway, and I can’t even be a pilot anymore, so all I’ve got now is this new skillset I never wanted, and now it’s going to fail and it was all for nothing.” He takes a deep breath, and Finn pulls himself free from the grip Poe realises has got tighter and tighter as he’s been talking, and sits back on his heels, softly rubbing his jaw, still watching, waiting, to see what will happen.

Poe pulls himself up, onto his knees, following, still speaking his piece, angry and too far gone now for anything but the whole truth. “I wanted you so badly, and I thought, maybe this was it, you were my reward from the universe, and then I get a mission, a goddamn mission in my assignments list alongside scrubbing the latrines and counting the rations, to seduce you and stop you from leaving and it broke my heart. I didn’t want to complete the mission. I almost left when I got it. I almost told you everything and took you away with me, but you were still unconscious, and I never could bring myself to betray them over something personal.”

He breathes in, deep, but his voice still shakes when he goes to finish. “You deserve someone better, Finn. You deserve someone more.”

There’s silence between them. Poe closes his eyes, lets his head flop onto his knees, breathing deeply through the sudden tiredness. He feels wrung out, six years now of secrets gone in less than a minute. 

He hears Finn takes a deep breath, and then shift on the sleeping bag, and feels a touch on his shoulder. His voice is low and soft. “Poe, I was trained from my earliest memories to hate everything the Republic stands for, to kill on sight and on command, to maim when killing was too good for them, and to believe that doing so was for the greater good. I hated everyone, it was the burning fire in my blood, and when I came to actually do it - to go out and kill for everything I believed in, I chose a different path. And while to everyone in the Resistance what I did looks easy, I don’t think anyone knows just how much I fight, everyday, against my conditioning.”

He is smiling just so wide when Poe raises his head, even though he’s saying things that must be difficult.

“I don’t have reference for this, which should be terrifying for me, but it isn’t. It’s beautiful and mine, the first feeling I know is truly mine and not something that I was indoctrinated from childhood to believe. Personal is - there is nothing worth more.”

Finn pauses, and then he sits back. He looks at the sky for a moment, chewing on his lip as he thinks. When he starts speaking again, he’s clear, as if talking from a long rehearsed script. “I’m not hiding anything from General Organa. I think she knows that, but I think she also knows I don’t want to be indoctrinated again, and I think she is rightly concerned that I won’t stick around. She wants me to be a hero, but I don’t want to be someone who dies in glorious battle. I want to be the kind of person who doesn’t think about how they want to die. If you had come to me when I was released and asked me to go with you, I’d have gone in a heartbeat. Wouldn’t have mattered where. And you did - maybe instead of the stars you took me to my room, and then into my own bed, and it was beautiful, it was something that was a secret but that wasn’t horrible. It was mine. So ask me now, ask me anything, and I’ll come with you.”

Poe stands, and holds his hand out. “Come in the water with me.”

It is dark now, but the moons are full, and the water is steaming slightly. Poe strips out of the warm cocoon of his flight suit with purpose, despite the screams of his skin that it is far too cold for that kind of thing, shedding it like a skin, and jumps into the water without looking. When he surfaces, there’s hair in his eyes and the water is just deep enough to tread water.

Finn is naked and peering at the depths. Then he jumps, and surfaces close enough to Poe to touch.

They have kissed before - that first kiss of betrayal was devastating, and the other kisses, the small-coin currency of the sexual act, blend together in Poe’s mind into one panting, lustful, hour long kiss of slick, swollen mouths. This kiss, by comparison, is bare-bones honest, and Poe is nervous, so incredibly nervous without the bravado of performance to hide behind, without the mission lurking in the back of his mind.

This kiss is all Finn. He has his hands on Poe’s face and kisses all-consumingly, straight into the stratosphere, straight into light speed, and in return Poe ends up feeling like he is consuming Finn in turn, his mouth open too wide for careful seduction, his grip too heavy, and they sink beneath the water from their weight and the negative buoyancy from their half-empty lungs.

It’s dark and warm below the surface, and Poe wants to stay here, always secretly identified with the heroines who drowned, they only last for a few seconds before they tear away to grab breaths and begin again in shallower water, feet planted and hearts open wide.

The fire in its pit casts long shadows that beckon them back to the camp as the water cools their bodies, and this time Poe isn’t worried about the unglamorous admin around sex. He and Finn work together to zip their sleeping bags together, laugh at unexpected gritty feet as Finn tackles him into the makeshift bed, lets himself get lost in feeling everything, good and bad, that courses through him as Finn gets to worshipping his body. It is not a performance nor a gift, it just is what it is, a pair of warm bodies on cool bedding, with a fire just out of arm’s reach, skin clammy and movements imperfect and yet still everything is alright, everything is great, and Poe shouts his orgasm with eyes wide to an unfamiliar sky and laughs afterward, daring the gods to defy him.

* * *

Poe wakes up slowly but waits to open his eyes. He can feel Finn next to him still, awake, his breathing quicker than during the night. There are soft fingers touching his hair. He is warm, and the only thing his body is complaining about is the feel of the pebble underneath his left hip.

It is a beautiful moment in his life. He wants to stay here forever. 

When he opens his eyes, Finn is there, and he kisses all the sweeter as the rest of his body comes alive. His skin is peppered with bruises from the crash, and his stomach is rumbling from hunger, and the same things are written on Finn’s body, but they are alive, and if they wanted they could stay here until they die.

Instead, there is a breakfast ration, and a wash in the lake, and then they go on a scouting mission after clearing away the obvious signs of having spent the night. Hiking in the mountains feels good even though it hurts to do hard inclines when you’re optimised for the pull of g-forces through nothing more than carefully designed gym workouts. 

There’s no guarantee that there’s anyone else on this moon. The scopes are still dead, but the kind of dead that says something, that there’s a blocking device, some kind of dampener, but not the modern kind that feeds in little blips to throw off the scent. It’s just silent, in the way space isn’t, and the reason why becomes obvious when they reach the crest of the mountain and see the stretch of salt flats on the other side.

It’s easier to see the evidence of things that have been moved in the night rather than the things that have been left, but that in itself is interesting. The Order knows they’re there, but instead of hunting them down and killing them, they chose to move everything off-planet. 

They climb down slowly, ever wary of a trap, but when they reach the churned-up mud of the former lake bottom, there are just a few ships left dotted around, obviously chosen as they could be plausibly civilian enough to pass muster if you’ve never seen a ship designed in the last twenty years. There are a few stalls around, apparently this is supposed to be a market, although why anyone would have a market in the middle of an empty planet is beyond question. The few milling people are so obviously plain clothes officers doing their best to pretend to be Normal Folks, and the market stall holders are just hired heavies, sentient space debris, the kind of smuggler and rogue that traded their morals for credits the moment they got a price for them.

They’re watched, but not very hard. It’s a good sign that Poe can see weaponry, blasters on hips and long guns leaning against trestle tables. It generally means that there isn’t an army hiding just over a ridge.

They keep walking, passing through, and Poe can hear the murmurings as they pass, the way the market dismantles in their wake. Maybe they had just interrupted the last part. Maybe there always was a black market that was held on this moon. He’ll probably never know.

When they walk out of sight of the market, they stumble onto probably the first legitimate piece of good luck Poe Dameron has had this entire war.

There’s a ship. Its pilot is nowhere to be seen, but they can be heard pissing against the far side. When Poe tells this story (and he tells this story over and over again), he will be far more of a dashing hero, but what happens is he distracts the pilot, and Finn hits him over the head with a length of heavy piping taken from their crashed X-Wing exactly for this purpose. The pilot goes down without a peep, his dick still in his hand.

Finn volunteers to drag the man’s still breathing body off behind some trees, and so Poe looks over the ship. The chassis number seems to match what the computer tells him it should be, minus some after-market weaponry, and it is the kind of middle-range cargo ship any small business man in the galaxy would consider after a couple of good years in business. 

He hauls himself into the cockpit and just about manages to stop himself sitting on something that’s been thrown on the seat there. It’s just a small box, at first glance, but it’s definitely not part of the ship. It looks old, a bit like the old fashioned camera that his Father had thirty years ago, the type that could record grainy holovideos that were prone to horizontal distortion, but took excellent static pictures. No one really carries a separate camera these days, they’re so integrated into the communicators, but when Poe picks it up and presses the power button, it springs out away from him, floating a few inches from the seat, several lenses peering at him the way BB-8 does, all innocent droid curiosity and excited, programmed loyalty. 

“Okay, not a camera” he thinks, but there’s something familiar about it, and then it hits him, the flight pattern familiar from recon missions past. He grabs it out of the air and sure enough, there’s a hole on the bottom, and when he lifts it to his eye he can see something so beautiful it makes him hoot in delight. They know that the First Order uses the old Imperial datastream hardware as its core data node, that was cracked generations ago, but the state-of-the-art encryption on top of it is what causes them all their myriad problems. It’s not just that their cyphers change daily, it’s that they really have no idea what hardware they’re using to do the encryption. They’ve seized things like this before, but they were dead on arrival, locked tight, and the moment they even try to get inside it, even to image it, it self-destructs. This little device, though, is unlocked. Why, he can’t even fathom. Maybe the man Finn just stashed away was someone important, or maybe just a crook who was both smart and lucky. Either way, there’s no indication that this is anything other than an unfiltered data access point. This is everything, the gate itself, if not the actual keys, to the kingdom.

Finn jogs up, and peers over his shoulder. “Poe, someone’s coming - wait, hey, you want to hang onto that. That’s a Captain’s command module.” 

Poe feels giddy, drunk, so excited he could burst. “Buddy, let’s get out of here. I want to go home.”

The transport is nothing like the familiar Republic design, but all aircraft have to follow the laws of physics, and the laws of physics are his area of expertise. Where there is pitch, yaw and roll, he can fly it. It feels good to be back where he started, as just a hot shot pilot, before he became something else, something more complicated.

Finn settles into what is likely supposed to be the navigator’s seat, and they take off quietly, leaving the atmosphere without any trouble. It’s a nice ship, its owner will be sad to see it gone, once he comes ‘round. It is designed for a solo pilot, but there are living quarters tucked to one side and a decent cargo bay on the other. Then there are the personal touches, the touches of paint, textured flooring, a much wider bed than what would normally be installed. This ship was someone’s life. Something about it reminds him of the way Leia talked about the years she and Han lived on the Millennium Falcon as newlyweds, trying to see if there was any other place for them in the galaxy but the roles they had been cast into.

The thought implants itself in the back of his mind, to be revisited later.

When they leave the atmosphere and enter the vastness of space, all evidence of there having been a First Order fleet in the system has vanished. They didn’t even dump their garbage before jumping away. The place is clean, back to how it was in Poe’s initial reports, just a load of unremarkable rocks revolving in space.

They meet the rescue fleet half-way there, and when they all return in a blaze of glory there is much shouting and cheering, the super-earnest way that they always seem to do. Poe produces the command module to collective gasps from the strategy room crew. Admiral Statura pats him on the back and tells him that General Organa herself is on her way back to debrief him personally, and that she gave him a message to give to Poe directly.

“She’s very proud,” says Statura. “She wanted me to tell you that.” 

* * *

Poe wakes up halfway through his sleep cycle gripped by the knowledge of what he has to do. He’s out of bed in record time, throwing things into his duffle bag, nudging BB-8 awake until he grumpily beeps into life. He doesn’t look back at this room.

He climbs the scaffolding up to Finn’s room and bangs on the door until Finn opens it, bare-chested and with sleep crusted in his eyes. 

“Pack a bag,” Poe says, heart in his mouth. “I need to do this before I talk myself out of it.”

Finn doesn’t ask, he knows the feeling that is coursing through Poe’s veins right now. The adrenaline of the pivotal moment.

“I need you,” Poe says, unbidden, as Finn turns to go pack.

“You need a copilot?” Finn yawns, groping around under his bed for a bag.

“No, beautiful, I need you. Kiss me, pack a bag, then come.”

They do kiss for a long moment, and then Finn is throwing all his standard-issue shirts and pants into a standard issue bag. They’ll stink of Republic the moment anyone gets close to them, which is fine. The whole point of being a stealth resistance was that they didn’t have customised uniforms or any externally-identifying marks if they could help it, so everything is just that - carefully unmarked standard-issue grunt clothes. If they can pass for Republic instead of Resistance, they might have a chance.

“As long as we aren’t going back to Jakku,” Finn says, throwing his bag over his shoulder. “Even if we are, I’m with you, but please, let’s find somewhere better.”

“Your choice, buddy, I promise.”

The hanger is quiet. Their stolen cargo ship is sitting where he parked it, away from the rest of the ships. Poe had put the launch keys in the wrong place on purpose, and retrieves them from under the odd-shaped hydrospanners. 

As he walks back, he tries to suppress the reflex to look over at his X-Wing. There’s a pang in his heart for what he is doing, but he’s defected once before; abandoning his post is nothing compared to being a traitor. The way wars go, he doubts he’ll ever see the inside of an X-Wing again. It tugs at him, his eternal love for the way they light up underneath him.

BB-8 rolls into the cargo ship and tries to express his disapproval, but Poe has put him into silent mode. It’s cruel, he is more of a being than a lot of the people he knows, but his whistles echo, and droids stick out far more when they’re chatty. He’ll unmute him soon, but he also can’t bear to hear his objections to flying in a kind of ship where the droid can’t be in control.

Finn should be storing their bags as Poe does the pre-flight checks, but instead he’s chewing his lip, bag lying forgotten at his feet.

“You’re panicking,” Finn says. It’s not a question.

Poe tries to play it off, goes back to his checks. “What? No. Yes.”

“Answer me something, Poe.” Finn says softly.

“Get in the ship, Finn.”

“No, you need to answer me first. Why now. Why tonight?”

Poe gets annoyed. The engine is purring and it’s louder than he remembers. Someone will hear. He wants to be out of the atmosphere, out of the system, before they talk about this. 

“Why not?” he snaps. He knows it’s a bad answer.

Finn just looks at him.

“Leia is back tomorrow. We should go before she gets here, before the war restarts, get as far away from all this as possible before we can’t, okay?”

“And then what, Poe?” Finn hisses. “Do you even have a plan? Supplies? Credits? A map of First Order-affiliated worlds to avoid?”

“Those aren’t important. We can get all those later. What’s important is a ship, and we have one, so let’s go.”

“No. Poe, come on! We’ll last five hours max. One day. We can do all of this in one day, and go tomorrow. All of this is easy. You hit the holonet, I hit the supply stores, we do this tomorrow, and we never look back. Because if we leave, we’ll never be allowed back. I’m with you, but I don’t want to die for a long time. If we’re going to do this, we have to give ourselves the best shot.”

There’s a small wrench just within arms reach, and Poe thinks that he could maybe distract Finn long enough, maybe with a kiss, to knock him out, drag him with him, make the choice for them. Finn is right, of course he’s right, but that doesn’t mean that Poe isn’t right as well.

The future stretches out again, and Poe takes a deep breath, and makes a choice.

They go back to Finn’s rooms high up in the rafters, and Poe thinks he’s too jumpy to sleep. He can hear the murmurings of the first shift rising and climbing down to breakfast, the window now closed, the birds trilling and dialing in the tree above his head. Poe breathes through his panic, and finds he falls asleep almost immediately, wrapped in Finn’s strong arms on his too-narrow cot.

* * *

There’s a commotion the next morning that wakes Poe well before Finn’s alarm goes off. The all hands klaxon is going off somewhere far-off, not quite making its way up to the top reaches of the barracks, but there’s a strange noise outside, a low roar that sounds like an engine, but unlike anything Poe has ever heard before.

He looks up through the gap around the branch in the ceiling, and then pulls his clothes on and runs out of the door, unable to believe what his eyes are telling him.

There’s a fleet. A whole goddamn fleet, and at the head of it is Leia, triumph written all over her face as it sinks in for everyone that she has returned with the greatest prize of all - command of the entire Republic fleet. He can’t even count how many squadrons of X-Wings are circling above, showing off in formation; just as he thinks he has a grasp on them, another twelve seem to pop into the sky and join the party. When Poe runs into the hangar there are faces he hasn’t seen for years and yelling, so much yelling, even though he knows he shouldn’t, his throat hurting, but he just can’t help it, it is insane. It’s a logistical nightmare, they have to find a place to put all these new people, find places to park all the new, shiny X-Wings, but for the first time it feels like they’ve made it, that everything he gave up when he defected might be made whole again. 

When he runs outside to co-ordinate with Bastian, there is an enormous bang, and when he looks up there’s a command carrier hovering like a third moon in the sky, huge and imperious and full of promise.

Finn was right, he thinks. They can slip away so much easier in the crowds. No one will notice them gone for hours. The horrible gnawing knot of guilt starts to dissipate as he mulls the thought over. No one needs them anymore. They can do this.

He retreats to his office, and it takes really no time at all to cross-reference the friendly worlds on the shortlist that fit his criteria, those that are a few hours’ hyperspace hop away, that aren’t under Order control, but not somewhere the Resistance would be able to set up a base, just a place they can just catch their breath before they disappear. He scrawls down the coordinates hastily, not trusting the network at the moment to keep any secret for long.

His pad beeps, the servers that had shut down under the emergency klaxon finally coming back online, and there are a flood of tasks assigned to him. There’s also a meeting in his calendar, a personal audience with the newly appointed Admiral of the Republican Fleet, Leia Organa.

He accepts, and rushes off, whistling despite himself.

* * *

He changes before his meeting with Leia. His old Republic uniform is symbolic, but it is also accurate. It fits, just, if he swaps his shirt out for a newer one and keeps his posture good. He puts the scrap of paper with the co-ordinates for their escape in his breast pocket, a talisman of good luck.

When he gets down to her big office, there’s a new aide sitting pretty at a desk, and she waves him through with a smile. Things are already getting more professional, he thinks, and they’ve only been Republic for the last four hours.

He stands to attention, a crisp salute and it feels like he’s come full circle. He’s nearly a decade older, but she somehow manages to look younger that she does in his memories. Her hair is coiled in a complex design, with more colour than before. She looks well-rested, and maybe also like she’s lost some weight, but then again, the last time he saw her, things were different. He was different. Her husband had just died, and he couldn’t look at her without remembering how she tasted. 

Her smile is the same though. It triggers something inside him, something bred into him, loyalty as genetic inheritance, that he wants to serve her, even after all they’ve been through. He trusts her, implicitly, and always has.

The captain’s command module is sitting on the wide desk in front of her. She waves a hand at him, and gestures for him to sit.

“Poe. There is no need to stand on ceremony. Please relax. It hurts to look at you.”

He does. The chair is ancient and uncomfortable, but it doesn’t matter, he can’t relax in uniform anymore.

“You look good,” he says. It’s all he can think of to say.

“You’ve been busy,” she says, gesturing at the command module. “This will save countless lives. This will win the war. I cannot thank you enough.”

He nods.

“I was going to come back,” she said, “around the time Finn woke up. I was worried about you, about the base, but mostly about him.” She sighs. “I know it hurt, what I asked you to do. I know you felt that doing what I asked was the final betrayal. I expected you to run. It was a desperate act by a desperate woman. I was there, at the ancient senate buildings in Coruscant, and people were screaming at me to solve all their problems, and I wanted to shout back that if they’d listened to me six years ago when I went to them and said that the First Order was getting out of hand, that maybe the Hosnian system would still be here. Instead, I told them I had an ex-stormtrooper who had information, and that we were making progress, and we needed credits and support more than to point fingers, more than any reconciliation committee, that a ceasefire was going to be temporary, and knowledge would give us power. Finn was my only piece of genuine intelligence, my one bartering chip, the one thing they weren’t disputing or disparaging and I was terrified that he would leave at any moment. I couldn’t leave, so I messaged you instead, because at the end of the day you were the only one I trusted to be able to make a difference.”

There is a silence that spreads between them. Poe thinks about the betrayal, how he lied, how much of a big deal lying about a fuck almost turned out to be, but how Leia achieved it all anyway. How his inner life reflects nothing of how he will be remembered. If he never wrote down these feelings, they would disappear, be irrelevant to history. No one would ever know that Leia Organa did terrible things, but no one would ever know what he did either.

He opens his mouth to say something, but there’s a knock at the door. Leia ignores it, gestures him to go on, but it doesn’t stop. “Enter!” she barks, and her aide bustles in. 

“Ma’am. The First Order have broken the ceasefire. Long range sensors confirm that there is a substantial fleet advancing on our position as we speak, they’ll be here within the day. Your orders?”

“Send the evacuation order.” Her head drops, and she braces herself against her desk. She turns to Poe and mutters, “I never wanted to have to say that ever again.”

“Do we know what worlds are safe?” Leia’s aide says, panic on the edge of her voice. She is young, part of the generation whose parents were born long after war left the core worlds, with no memory to pass on. She has no frame of reference for this, and it shows. “We’ve been doing recon for months looking for a new base, but we need somewhere to go now. Somewhere that we know they won’t be.”

Poe reaches inside his jacket, and looks down at the crumpled paper in his hands. He can hear the dull buzz of Leia and her aide talking to each other, but he isn’t listening anymore. They don’t need a new base, there’s no point worrying about that now, there’s too many lives at stake to waste good chasing perfection. They need somewhere to go now, tonight, to just vanish the way the Order did from Daphari. 

Somewhere where they can catch their breath. 

“I have a list, Ma’am,” he says, and hands over that last shred of selfish hope in a twist of cheap paper.

Leia reads it, then nods at him in thanks, takes the command module from her desk, and leaves without looking back.

Poe manages to stagger around the desk to Leia’s chair before he falls down. He sits there for what feels like hours, the emergency evacuation signal blaring around him, drowning out his thoughts. He imagines Finn hearing the klaxon as he sorts through the supplies for ones that won’t be missed. (There are none of those anymore. They will count them and the quartermaster will be issued with a blaster with instructions to shoot to kill.)

Maybe this is it, how it was always going to be. It is likely that they would have died soon after they left, if Poe had got his way the night before. Maybe they would have jumped right into the path of the advancing First Order fleet and he would be remembered as a traitor, rather than a hero.

They have a chance this time. The command module, the new fleet of veteran pilots and ships built this century. A general who is well-rested, with a team she trusts and a Senate behind her for the first time in her career. A small but growing cadre of stormtrooper defectors, their minds brimming with tactical knowledge and quotidian secrets. Perhaps this time it will be a clean war, that most rare of things, the kind the galaxy hasn’t seen since his grandparents were small, since before even the Old Republic fell. 

Perhaps he and Finn will have new roles, grow into them, survive and live to grow old, safe and sound and treasured, indispensable. Perhaps no one will die. 

Maybe things will be different, this time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story would not exist without Deputychairman, who sent me the [original prompt](http://drawsaurus.tumblr.com/post/138564040801/some-real-dub-con-trash-talk-about-poe-dameron) in the first place, and who carefully held my hand and screamed along with me as I made horrible things happen to Poe, and then told me that my original ending didn’t work, to stop making people give dramatic speeches in the Queen’s English. Equal, eternal thanks to Artifactrix, who helped more than she knows with solving the problem of Poe and Finn’s relationship, giving this the ending that works, and who beat this story into shape with utmost care and love, and Gloss, who told me it wasn’t shit even without reading it, because she is the best.
> 
> This fandom is just full of wonderful people, it is a honour to be on this ride with you.
> 
> I'm not done with this universe. I have other stories planned, gaps to fill, porn impulses to indulge. But for now, this is done. I hope you enjoyed it.

**Author's Note:**

> Eternal thanks to deputychairman for her tireless reading, handholding and betaing, gloss for her endless enthusiasm and artifactrix for all the ending help, and the wonderful detailed beta.
> 
> New chapters Wednesday and Saturdays.
> 
> If you enjoyed it, please consider reblogging [the original post](http://cicaklah.tumblr.com/post/145764086360/consent-to-be-wrecked-cicak-star-wars-episode), and come hang out with me on tumblr, at [cicaklah](http://cicaklah.tumblr.com)


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